All the laptops and desktops in our company are protected with VEB, nicely integrated with VBR.
Also, all of them are secured with whole disk encryption.
Due to company privacy etc. I won't disclose which software we use.
This week one of the laptops started to crash, Windows kept freezing completely at random for no apparent reason.
After some investigation it turned out the SSD had unrecoverable errors.
So we had to replace the SSD with a new one and clone the data.
Replacing the SSD was easy enough, however the laptop doesn't have an optical drive which provides a bit of a challenge since we didn't have a USB one at hand either.
This is where we decided to put the VEB recovery media in WDS, I've extracted the boot.wim from the ISO and put it in WDS to boot from.
PXE laptop boot and off we go.
During the bare metal restore (which ran without problems) I realised... uh oh.. disk encryption.
But off course everything ran without problems, VEB runs while Windows is decrypted, which means the backup contains no encryption.
Disk restored, Windows loaded without a hitch and the freezing is fixed.
Encrypted the new drive again and "Bob's your uncle"
Pro tip: use WDS when you have no optical drive available.
Veeam suggestion: how about SMART integration in VEB so these issues can become apparent during backup?
Thanks for this magnificent piece of software!
