Very basic question about Free Windows Veeam Agent features.

[gordom]

Hi to everyone.
I consider to install Free Veeam Agent for Windows and therefore I have a question, a very basic one (surprisingly I couldn't find the answer on the internet). What backup methods (incremental, differential etc.) does a Free Veeam Agent for Microsoft Windows support?
Regards,
gordom

[Gostev]

Hello!

This User's Guide chapter provides excessive details > Backup Chain

In short, standalone agent supports forward incremental with or without periodic Synthetic or Active full backup.

In other words, the options are:
1. Forever-forward incremental (no periodic fulls).
2. Classic incremental with periodic active full backup (new full is created from data on primary storage).
3. Classic incremental with periodic synthetic full backup (new full is synthesized from data on backup storage) < not available in free version.

Thanks!

[gordom]

Thank you for your kind answer,
Regards

[nickatsbt]

I also have a question about the free version. I'm trying to backup to a WD My Cloud NAS drive using Windows 10 home and have not had any luck. Is there a procedure somewhere listed for this? Every time I try to point it to the drive it says incorrect path.

[Dima P.]

Hello and welcome to the forums nickatsbt,

Here is a link to Protect Windows Computer guide. Can you please share a screenshot of the error you got? Thanks!

[HiHoItsOffToWorkWeGo]

I also have some Very basic questions about Free Windows Veeam Agent features:

My use-case is very simple, a home PC with an external USB HDD for backup.
Very relevant to my upcoming questions are the HDD sizes involved: the PC has a 6TB HDD, and the external HDD is 8TB.
The first full backup of the PC fits easily on the external HDD, of course.
Subsequent incremental backups of the PC also fit onto the remaining space on the external HDD.
The problem is, that within around 7 days, a new full backup will occur. (or a Synthnthetic Full apparently if I buy a license).
However, there isn't any remaining disk space for a second full backup of the PC to fit onto the external HDD.

Q1. How are VEEAM users with this use-case expected to continue performing backups beyond the first week?

Q2. Is forever incremental the correct approach here? (doesn't seem safe to me)

Q3. Are storage-based fast-clone synthetic fulls using an external HDD formatted with ReFS and a licensed copy of VEEAM agent possible?
(can money solve this problem, without buying another eight external HDDs?)

Q4. Even if I invest in a 14TB external drive, this would only allow me to backup for one additional week.
(what am I miss-understanding here?)

[Mildur]

Your 6TB harddisk will not be using all 6TB on your harddisk.
Backup file will be around 3-5TB. It depends on compression and some automatically left out temp files. And of course, your free space doesn‘t need to be backuped.

External usb disks cannot be formated with refs.
And your „windows 10 home edition“ pc will not be able to use refs. Only „Windows 10 for Workstations“ are refs enabled. This is a microsoft license Limitation.

Forever incremental should be safe.
Be sure, that you test your backups on a regular basis. No one guarantees you, that your restores are working. Testing is always recommendet

One thing to configure is backup file health Check:
https://helpcenter.veeam.com/docs/agent ... tml?ver=40

[HiHoItsOffToWorkWeGo]

@Mildur thank for taking the time to respond.
Other products I've seen, *cough* windows image backup *cough*, seem to be just fine constantly writing images to the same drive, readily keeping several older recovery points available on the same disk, space permitting. Basically the disk will have the recent image and several earlier images available for image restore, all implemented with volume shadow copy technology built into Windows.
I was hoping VEEAM can, at a minimum, do something similar.

re: REFS, I understand that Windows 10 can still read and write to REFS volumes, only the ability for format such volumes has been removed in the current version.
This inconvenience can be easily circumvented by connecting the external drive to a server elsewhere, or even an evaluation server running as a VM using USB passthrough, and formatted that way.

I really just want to know how everyone else backs up their home PC.
You're saying that if they use VEEAM, they probably do forever forward incremental. Thanks for your answer.
Do you know whether the "Health Check for Backup Files" feature is included in the Free edition?

I guess the true answer is probably that nobody does backups of their home PCs.

[Gostev]

Other products I've seen, *cough* windows image backup *cough*, seem to be just fine constantly writing images to the same drive, readily keeping several older recovery points available on the same disk, space permitting. Basically the disk will have the recent image and several earlier images available for image restore, all implemented with volume shadow copy technology built into Windows.
I was hoping VEEAM can, at a minimum, do something similar.

Veeam can certainly do all this and more. Not sure what made you think from his response that Veeam can't do this?

[HiHoItsOffToWorkWeGo]

Veeam can certainly do all this and more. Not sure what made you think from his response that Veeam can't do this?

VEEAM can only fit the FIRST full 5TB backup onto the 8TB drive as well as several incremental backups, leaving around 2TB free on the 8TB drive.
BUT VEEAM will have no room to write the SECOND full 5TB backup into the 2TB of the remaining space on the 8TB drive.
This means VEEM backup only works during the first backup and several subsequent incremental backups, but cannot protect a computer on an ongoing basis, without deleting ALL previous backups from the drive, at least once every week, which leaves the protected computer exposed at those times.
Can VEEAM agent for Windows free edition use storage features (e.g. REFS) to perform a block-linked fast-clone to create a space-efficient synthetic full? (Rhetorical: no it cannot)
Can the paid-for edition? (can this capability be purchased?)
Gostev could you please tell me the expected way to use VEEAM to backup a computer?
First full backup works fine.
Second-Sixth incremental backups also work fine.
On the seventh day, the VEEAM agent will want to perform a full backup (or synthetic full), but the storage has no room for this.
What I'm saying is that it doesn't appear to be possible to use VEEAM to protect a computer on an ongoing basis (and without deleting all previous backups) UNLESS the external storage drive capacity exceeds TWICE THE SIZE of the data being protected. Is this conclusion correct?

I can imagine installing VEEAM VBR community edition, configuring the PC to be the VBR server and the repository server, with the repository configured to use the 8TB external drive, that's been pre-formatted with REFS. I'm vaguely expecting this combination to unlock fast-clone capabilities enabling the creation of fast-clone synthetic fulls.
Surely you're not expecting all your customers to go to these extreme lengths to protect their computers on an ongoing basis?
Am I the only person with a 6TB HDD in the PC?
Does everyone else use 128GB SDD drives in their PCs and are backing up to an external 2TB drive, allowing over 16x full backups to be retained?
Is this a problem only affecting customers with "large" internal HDDs?
Is this a first-world problem?
(Rhetorical, I suspect the answer to all these is: YES)

[Gostev]

VEEAM can only fit the FIRST full 5TB backup onto the 8TB drive as well as several incremental backups, leaving around 2TB free on the 8TB drive.
BUT VEEAM will have no room to write the SECOND full 5TB backup into the 2TB of the remaining space on the 8TB drive.
This means VEEM backup only works during the first backup and several subsequent incremental backups, but cannot protect a computer on an ongoing basis, without deleting ALL previous backups from the drive, at least once every week, which leaves the protected computer exposed at those times.

Actually, this is not at all how Veeam Agent works, at least not by default. I would suggest reading the User Guide for the facts, instead of making incorrect assumptions
In short, above you're describing classic incremental backup with periodic fulls, while we use forever-incremental backup by default and the SECOND full is never needed.

[HiHoItsOffToWorkWeGo]

I would suggest reading the User Guide for the facts, instead of making incorrect assumptions

That is actually an excellent idea!

I spotted this: https://helpcenter.veeam.com/docs/agent ... tml?ver=40

Bingo, thanks to "backup block injection of the incremental into the full", the full backup remains on the external drive and is kept up-to-date by injecting older incremental backups into it.
Thanks, this answers my question, and I now look forward to using VEEAM agent for Windows free edition!

Side note: I can't be the only person that took this long to understand this.
I had tried VEEAM agent for windows, free edition, on several occasions previously, but it soon failed because of "external disk full", so I felt forced to give up on using this product and went back to Windows Image Backup.
I even had very short retentions, something like 1 or 2 recovery points , but this still happened, even with version 4.0.
Maybe if the product had some kind of way to dynamically adapt the retention based on the space available on the external volume, so that the "magic" of "backup block injection of the incremental into the full" always has enough space to occur, then this problem might occur less frequently, and more potential customers could be retained?

Retention Policy in Free and Workstation Editions
If an obsolete restore point exists, Veeam Agent for Microsoft Windows transforms the backup chain. As part of this process, it performs the following operations:
Veeam Agent for Microsoft Windows re-builds the full backup file to include in it data of the incremental backup file that follows the full backup file. To do this, Veeam Agent for Microsoft Windows injects into the full backup file data blocks from the earliest incremental backup file in the chain. This way, a full backup ‘moves’ forward in the backup chain.
The earliest incremental backup file is removed from the chain as redundant: its data has already been injected into the full backup file, and the full backup file includes data of this incremental backup file.
If the backup chain contains several obsolete restore points, the rebuild procedure is similar. Data from several restore points is injected to the re-built full backup file. This way, Veeam Agent for Microsoft Windows makes sure that the backup chain is not broken, and you will be able to recover your data to any restore point.