Today (Wednesday) at VeeamON brought with it some of the biggest news to come out of the conference. Veeam has officially announced the arrival of Veeam Endpoint Backup, a solution enabling IT shops to backup their physical Windows desktops and laptops, but do it in a similar style as to how we currently backup our virtual infrastructure with Veeam Backup and Replication. Oh, one more important key to this announcement is that Veeam Endpoint Backup is absolutely free – I thought that ensued a worthy mention in the first paragraph!
But you can’t hot-add my laptop?
Ok, let’s take a look at what we know thus far about how this works. Basically we are looking at a package that is installed directly on our endpoint. From there, we can chose to backup our entire system, individual volumes, or specify individual files to be part of our backup job. Easy enough thus far right? As for targets, or where we are going to backup to we have a few options – we can backup to a drive attached to the source machine, such as a USB or SATA disk, we can point our job to a NAS device or to a file server via a CIFS share, or, perhaps the most appealing to me, we could backup a Veeam Backup and Replication repository. From there its just a matter of setting up your retention settings and you are set to go with physical protection provided by Veeam
The restore process is much the same as the backup, meaning we can perform file or volume level restores, as well as complete bare-metal restores. Veeam has also provided the option to create a recovery type USB key that can be used to boot the endpoint in the event that you aren’t able to get to Windows in order to do the restore.
So what’s and endpoint?
Veeam has stated that this is not an Enterprise product and its main purpose is to provide protection for your Windows desktops and laptops. Tha