VEB Saved My Bacon, Full of Win

[rreed]

I have to give an atta-boy to Veeam and Endpoint Backup. Outside of using it at work for 6+ years and loving it, I use VEB to backup my home Win10Home laptop to an external USB drive. Not as often as I should, but I do, and I'm about to increase that frequency, apparently. I lost my HDD entirely, a couple weeks ago. Flat dead, no boot device found, no HDD found, no nothing. Not to fear, I ordered up a new matching HDD (SSHD, actually, but we digress), stuck it in, and realizing I hadn't made my recovery media (shame on me, please make sure you do this), but was able to make a basic one off another machine, booted to the CD as described, picked Bare Metal Recovery, it found my USB and backup stored w/in, and off it went. It did indicate something about the drivers possibly not matching since it appeared to be from different hardware (which the recovery media was), and that I might have to retry w/ some different options in case it blue screens upon first boot, but it didn't, so didn't apply to me. Once the restore was complete, I spit out the CD, disconnected my USB drive, hit reboot, and my laptop w/ new drive came back exactly how I left it the last time I backed up like nothing ever happened. So full of win, massively excellent job Veeam, well done.

Previously I only backed up every so often, about once every 2-3 weeks or so, or about as often as I'd remember to do it and feel like messing w/ it. We use our home laptop for 99% web/shopping/streaming movies so not much changes. We do backup our phones to it, but much like the laptop backups themselves, not very often. My last backup was shortly after Christmas and the HDD died some time mid-late January. There was no new user data on it that got missed, but of course its antivirus, Windows Updates, other misc. updates are screaming but that's fine, they're catching up. I will now be backing up our phones and laptop at least every weekend. What if we had backed up our phones or any other important data (read: family pics), missed a backup, and lost/smashed/stolen phone, like happens to my wife about every other month?

One sort of caveat though. It's a Dell Inspiron 15R 5537 laptop. The replacement HDD I ordered was supposed to be just a blank Seagate SSHD that barely came in a bubble wrap static bag (I hope that was a static bag). I drop in the drive, and booted it just to make sure the laptop would see it, etc. basically function at all to comfirm the drive was good. It immediately came up w/ an out-of-the-box Win8 Dell load just like when we very first got it. I don't know if the laptop itself threw this onto the HDD upon first boot (which is what appears to have happened), this allegedly fresh blank drive somehow had the same OS on it that our laptop came w/, I don't know. Strange but didn't care because I was going to do a BMR to it. While trying to choose BMR, automatic, it said the existing disk layout was incompatible, select manual to manually map the partitions, I don't recall. Anyways, they looked the same (OS, recovery, a couple other misc. small partitions that are common to modern OS's). It still didn't like it so I just wiped the drive completely then it seemed happier to run in automatic mode. Didn't much get in the way but was just odd. Again, once complete, laptop is right back where I left it. Excellent job.

[Dima P.]

Awesome post, it just made my day brighter. Thank a lot – I’ll be glad to share it with the Veeam teeam, if you don’t mind.

P.S. It’s sad that I cant ‘like’ your post more than once

[rreed]

Please feel free. Least I could do to give back. I'll be sharing my story w/ our own internal team at our next staff meeting, and suggest they get their home machines on VEB as well before they lose their bacon. Again, excellent job Veeam. Many thanks.

[mkaec]

You may want to consider getting a My Cloud or some other sort of personal NAS. Then you can set up VEB (and Windows File History) and (possibly) the phones to auto-backup to it. My Cloud does have support for phones, but I haven't used it.

You pledge to backup the computer and phones every weekend, but that will become a hassle. I'm a big fan of setting something up that will be automatic. (Though automatic backup that breaks can sometimes go unnoticed. I am hoping a future version of VEB will include an option to be more vocal when the most recent backup is becoming stale.)

[Gostev]

Good idea!

[rreed]

A user-configurable nagging of "hey, dummy, you haven't backed up in x-amount of time, you should back up now please" would be great. Enable/disable, and configure for in how much time since its last backup before nagging please. In my case, shame on me, my last backup was over a month old, but luckily no real user data had changed since my last backup so I wasn't out anything going back that far. That's not going to happen to everyone in every single case.

Good point on automation, but it's been a filthy habit of mine to manually backup my home stuff by hand since I can remember. Just a bad habit that I've never changed. And I store my backup USB drive in a fire safe so that would make automation for me difficult. I will say running a backup upon inserting your media is great for this though, all I have to do is go fetch and plug in the cable. Off it goes. I love that. For the average person who doesn't wear a tinfoil hat, automated backup to cloud storage would be fantastic.

Side note, a couple oddities did pop up after the restore. All my logged in web sessions were logged out like it didn't keep the cookie or whatever. not a problem, just an observation. And I had to re-trust my iPhone after the restore. Everything synced up and worked fine, it was just a little odd that the restored iTunes needed to re-establish trust w/ my phone. Entered my passcode and it went on like nothing ever happened. Again, no real problems, just observations, and hard to say what, if any of that had to do w/ the restore.

Oh, and the time was off exactly a couple of hours after the restore. Time zone was correct, internet connectivity was certainly there, it would never correct after a handful of reboots and shutdowns, or just leaving it on for hours at a time. Had to point the time to a different time server (I think it was on Windows time, pointed to another random one in the list) then it picked backup up and corrected. I dunno. Odd again but whatever.

[SaschaH]

P.S. It’s sad that I cant ‘like’ your post more than once

I'll gladly help you out with another like!