After a forum search I could find only occasional references to free this backup program, which I feel deserves its own thread. https://www.veeam.com/windows-endpoint-server-backup-free.html Admittedly as my go-to program is Macrium I have used it to reinstall a backup only occasionally so can't vouch for reliability, but it is fast, does not consume many resources and can backup to an external hard drive or a NAS, so I use it to have a secondary option just in case.
This program mainly targets enterprise users so the reliability should not be an issue. As I only do offline cold disk image backup/restore, he biggest issue for me is that the recovery media can only restore an backup, but can not create one from within the recovery environment. This might not be an issue for others. So in this case, yes, this is a robust program and I agree it certainly deserve its own thread.
If a System blows up (for whatever reason), any Recovery Media worth its salt must be able to make images, especially of the partition/disk that just blew up. How else do you get access, after the fact, to the FileStructure of the injured partition/disk. What @oliverjia describes above is a MUST HAVE in any imaging System.
I tried the free version of Veeam but did not keep it because it allows only one backup job to be defined. That's fine if you want to back up only to a NAS or a USB drive, but not if you want to backup to a NAS and a USB drive (or to multiple USB drives). That's a pity, because it also allows restoring from different hardware, it will replace drivers from the image with drivers copied to the recovery media.
Froggie, far from me to argue with you, I don't consider myself a techie, whereas I have always learnt from your posts. But, please explain your point above, I don't get it. I always thought the main point of a Recovery Media was to be able to boot - when the system is blown up - and restore an image from a (previous) point in time when the system was working fine. What am I missing?
As I said, when the System blows up (for whatever reason other than drive failure), there may be very valuable DATA on the blown partition/disk and the only way to retrieve it is to image that blown partition and work/extract from that taken image to retrieve the important DATA. Since the blown partition is not functional, or its resident image taking capability, the only option left is to image it from the Recovery Media and work with that image after you've recovered your System. Without image taking capability in the Recovery Media, you've lost it all. I've run into this particular need at least 5-times over the years on my personal System... and it's especially important for business-related Systems as well as servers. For personal Systems, I'm sure the need varies... but there will be a time ...and no, we're not arguing
...and there's always those casual users that only image weekly (Full or Diff)... that's a weeks worth of possible important DATA gone.
Since I always image my complete HDD (not just the system partition), and I do my incrementals (almost) daily, the need to make image backups from the recovery media is not too important for me. The only occasion where I need to do this is when I want a Sector by Sector Cold Full backup of my RB-RX protected HDD. And I only do this before I play with different RB-RX versions.
Thanks, it's clearer now. I don't see this scenario as relevant to me, as I run daily image backup schemes (full/differential/incremental) of my OS with Macrium + Veeam, at different times, and the daily difference is mostly minimal with the exception of when I install a new program. My data, which resides on other disks, has continuous backups both locally as well as in the cloud.
Veeam Agent for Windows FREE version 6.0 Released hxxps://forums.veeam.com/veeam-agent-for-windows-f33/current-version-t29537.html Download: hxxps://download.veeam.com/VAW/v6/VeeamAgentWindows_6.0.0.960.zip
Is Veeam Backup & Replication the full version of Veeam Agent for Microsoft Windows FREE? It's a confusing website.