Interesting version! It could even be sound had we not had certain large customers who are very picky when it comes to backup products : )
Jokes aside, the bug is indeed rarely seen and because of that it wasn't detected by pretty much anyone, even by those who test BMR (QA and the customers).
I'm glad to hear that the big customers are happy. I'm a really small (but paying) customer who needs bare metal recovery to work on a few dedicated servers in a remote datacenter, and unfortunately Veeam does not make this easy. I've written a lot about my experiences on this forum. I don't know why "enterprise" customers would have an easier time than me, but I suppose that's just how it is.
It's good that the ISO boot bug is rare. I have no idea why it would crop up in certain situations, but I'm genuinely happy that you've isolated the cause.
Next, since we are here discussing relevant problems, I'd like to ask you if you could give us an example of some Linux backup product (including OSS) which you truly like.
No solution is perfect, and I haven't tested all of them. For Linux I use a mix of open source products such as rsync/rsnapshot and UrBackup as well as commercial ones like R1Soft and Veeam. I don't rely on any single product.
R1Soft: This is the solution I was looking to replace with Veeam. R1Soft runs the UI on the backup servers, but with Veeam I had to set up a Windows instance for this purpose. While I like the power of the VBR interface, it's a pain to have to set up a Windows instance just for it. I also found out that Veeam doesn't support backing up MariaDB databases. Since this is the default database for my Linux distro (RHEL/CentOS), I can't switch to Veeam for my database backups. R1Soft still seems to support MariaDB.
Acronis Cyber Backup: I see this as your most serious competitor. If you haven't already, I would
strongly suggest signing up for their trial product and seeing how it works. Their bare metal restore process for Linux is silky smooth compared to all the manual steps I need to carry out with Veeam (mostly because Acronis handles disk partitioning and mdraid in a superior way). Also, after an Acronis restore, my systems are immediately bootable. With Veeam, that's never the case. I always have to regenerate initramfs, check mdadm.conf, or fiddle around with some other critical things that I'd rather not be doing in a DR scenario. In fact, I would probably use Acronis if not for their odd infrastructure requirements. With Veeam, I can build my own repositories on various hardware or VMs, and I can achieve redundancy by creating backup copy jobs. Acronis lets you create just a single backup destination on your own infrastructure (similar to a Veeam repo). If you want more, then you need to license the software as a service provider, which lets you set up your own complex Acronis-centered infrastructure. Otherwise, you've got to buy backup storage space from a provider and hope that it's reliable.
