Seeking input as to your practice for Backing Up your PC’s Image utilizing Local Lan Storage, as opposed to Cloud Based or MS Server based techniques.
Thanks in advance,
Gary
Veeam is my go-to for image based backup over a LAN. You can use the Veeam Agent free edition alongside Veeam Backup and Replication and that would allow for 3-2-1 off to another site/the cloud if you chose to do that. If you don’t want to use VBR, the agents can also backup to a few storage types.
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I use Synology’s Active Backup for Business to perform bare-metal backups on 50 PCs. It works great and it’s seamless.
Did you have to pay for B&R in order for it to work with Veeam’s free Agent in your use case? Are you replicating off site?
My biggest hesitancy was that Agent for Windows doesn’t allow for defining multiple backup locations. I have a B&R Server at my office, but to get both local and offsite backups, I would have had to license B&R for the local site as well, when literally all I wanted to do was dump one backup locally and one offsite. I felt like this could easily be resolved by allowing local backups that the Agent syncs back to a B&R server.
I really like Veeam, and I still use their free agents, but I just have them dumping to a file share without B&R. I’ve wrote scripts that look for new files in the destination folders and alert if there’s not been one in 8 days, and that’s fine, I suppose. Eventually thinking about tying that into Nagios, but I know the B&R console is a really nice resource, I just don’t want to pay for it when I won’t really leverage it for anything except a target for endpoints. I guess I’m wondering if I’m doing it wrong, lol.
I’m revisiting this because I have hardware to deploy Azure DRS (Site Recovery) on, and wondered if I should look at Veeam again.
If you’re licensed for B&R, you can run the actual backup repository on “as many servers as you want” as it’s licensed based on the amount of virtual servers you’re protecting and Endpoint is licensed by… endpoint. (At least, last time I checked)
Very interesting! Either this wasn’t the case many years ago, or my sales rep didn’t know/understand what I was trying to do. The license gets loaded into the B&R server, and if I want a B&R Server for the “client” site, I just load in the same license as long as I don’t exceed the protected endpoints?
I’m going to have to look into this. This could be game changing for me. Thanks for taking the time!
Yeah; that’s where the “replication” part of Backup & Replication comes in. So you should be able to have an “endpoint backup server” managed under the same enterprise console but more optimized for the workload, and you could even replicate backups between your different backup servers.
I’m a Veeam partner in their service provider program so our licensing is a bit different as we do month to month rentals, but as I recall for the non-partners, you need to either license B&R and use with agent free OR you need to license endpoints and use B&R free. I haven’t tried the newest free version of B&R though, it might be more flexible. These days most of the churches we support are doing Onedrive KFM alongside AAD/Intune though so we are moving more and more to the Veeam O365 backup product.