Veeam Windows Endpoint (Workstations) - USMT like features?

[Mgamerz]

Hi all,

I have a current backup product that backs up user data (not in image format) and runs USMT to back up the system state which can be used to fairly easily migrate users to new computers or operating systems (same or newer). I have just learned that my product won't be around in a few years and the alternatives aren't really an option for my organization. I've used Veeam Workstation edition on a few edge case systems we have, and it's worked fairly well for those (but they also don't have a "primary user").

How well does Veeam Agent for Windows (Free, or Workstation edition) work for a situation like this? I know you can just reinstall the image onto a new system, but we have a considerable amount of expensive software that has equally expensive (and annoying) licensing protection schemes that get real bent out of shape if they detect components have changed. That is why migrating data and essentially doing a USMT (which our other backup software does automatically) has worked well for us as licensing on a fresh install is typically less work than trying to figure out what gets the DRM all bent out of shape.

Does anyone have any experience/input on how veeam handles something like this? My users have become accustomed to this type of procedure, and I would like to see if I can continue it. I would probably use workstation edition because forever incremental backups are worth the price of admission.

Note, we have a veeam B&R Enterprise edition server that they would back up to.

[HannesK]

Hello,
in general, there is no need for the user state migration tool if you restore an image backup (no matter which backup software). For Veeam: edition is not relevant.

The question is, what exactly is your software checking and how USMT helped here. Example: if it detected CPU ID changes, how did USMT help here? If it is only the MAC address, then you can probably fix that manually.

Best regards,
Hannes

[Mgamerz]

It is not that USMT fixes the licensing, it's that I can typically just reimage the machine and use our current client backup software to restore the data by the time I go through the steps of fixing the licensing for the software. That leaves the issue though of me having to manually restore the user's data if I can't restore the image.

With this type of migration I can also restore data to a new system even if the original image was going belly up - e.g. a system bluescreens every day for a month (user does not report it). With image based backups, I can restore a backup from a month ago, but then I don't have any data from the most recent month unless I go into that backup as well and fish the data out myself. For the most part I don't care at all about image based backups of endpoints, the data is all I care about. I know that's not how veeam agent works, but since my product is going away, I'm looking for alternatives.

Flexnet DRM specifically is one of the more awful ones, and we have a lot of software that uses it, when I've moved a disk from one system to another (edge case of how I do things) all of the software that uses this DRM stops working. That's all way out of my control though.

[HannesK]

but then I don't have any data from the most recent month unless I go into that backup as well and fish the data out myself

maybe it's lost in translation, but you always have the current data with image based backup. you can choose whether you want single file restore, volume restore or full system restore from every restore point. you do incremental backup every day, but from a logical point, image backup is always a full backup. Of course, if the backup is in a state that results in blue screens, then a full restore makes no sense. In that case you can still restore volume level (non-OS) or file level.

of course you can also do old style file backup, but I don't see a use case for that. I recommend to just try it out as it does not cost you anything.