Am I missing something re Veeam Mac Backup?

[solmssen]

Hi - So I've been experimenting with the Mac Backup Agent in my Community Edition B&R 11 server with the idea of using it for my Mac-based clients, and while I understand this is a 1.0 release, either I'm missing something or I'm a bit disappointed. As much as I want this to be a replacement for Time Machine, it doesn't seem to be. I love the idea of file level backups of user data into my B&R repository, but am I missing the ability to do a full image backup of the machine? My users are running heavily configured machines with lots of software and personal settings - the point of backing them up for me isn't just limited to user data, it's about making sure the work of making those machines the way the users want them is preserved. As finicky and weird as Time Machine can be, by and large if I backup a machine with Time Machine and then do a restore, that machine is the way I left it. All the software is where it should be, everything is configured the way it should be, in much the same way that the Veeam Windows Agent allows me to backup a complete machine state, not just the user's files.

Right now, I'm using local USB disks and Time Machine, or in a few cases, a Synology NAS with individual shares for each Mac (so they don't crowd each other out) to back up to using Time Machine (or in the case of the btrfs Synology machines, I can have user quotas and one big share). This is on the face of it a terrible system that cannot scale, because there's no deduplication, no reporting, etc, etc. I was hoping Veeam would save me from this. But it doesn't seem to be a complete solution if I have to spend a lot of time installing and reconfiguring macOS and software after a restore.

Am I wrong about this? Somebody tell me I'm wrong.

[HannesK]

Hello,
Veeam agent for MAC does file level backup only today. You are right about full image backup. I cannot tell you that you are wrong

Best regards,
Hannes

[nikolaj]

Hi Andrew,

You do provide valid reasoning for having image level backups. There are a couple of threads where people advocate for image based restores for the Mac agent. Perhaps, you could share your expectations and feedback in one of them (e.g the former one).

However, I have to ask, how frequently do you perform full OS-image restores on Mac machines, on average?

Thanks.

[solmssen]

Not often, but when I do, it saves me hours. Boot to recovery, pick a point in time, and restore! OS upgrades go bad every now and again. I've had machines go into boot loops because they had enough free disk space to start the upgrade but not enough to finish it. Maybe I'm old school, but I just don't think it's a full backup unless I can bring the machine up from bare metal with it. What Veeam has done here will serve the large corporate environments where Macs are an afterthought and have to fit into defined processes for Windows, but it's not bare metal backup, and I miss that.

[nikolaj]

Thanks for the feedback, Andrew, duly noted.