Feature request: more local/lan jobs for non-server for home users

[ascaris]

Hi everyone,

I'm using Veeam agent for Linux to back up my personal PCs at home (I'm a PC nerd... don't have a smartphone and don't want one, but I have more PCs than it makes sense to have, but I've been a "computer" guy since the mid-80s, and phones/tablets just don't do it for me), and it's a really impressive product. I use it with encryption enabled, and it's still almost unbelievably fast! I previously used the free version of Aomei Backupper (for Windows), with the backups performed from the rescue media (since I am not running Windows). There are a lot of backup programs for Windows, but of the ones I tried, Aomei was the only one that offered encryption in the free version and that didn't show a massive slowdown when encryption was enabled. It worked, but it was a pain to have to shut down and boot to the rescue media, and have my computer offline while the whole backup was being performed. And then Aomei got rid of the encryption in their free version, which is certainly their prerogative. When I had a full disk image of a MBR drive get restored as GPT, which of course did not work in my BIOS PC, I quit using Backupper.

Since making the move to Linux, I've found substitutes for all of my former Windows programs, or else I've been able to run them in Linux using WINE, save one... a fully-functioned image-type backup program. A program of this sort that needs direct hardware access won't work in WINE, as I understand, and even if it did, I don't know that I would trust its backups. What I really wanted was a native backup program, and the old standbys like Clonezilla, which have no image mode, no compression (afaik), no encryption, and no incrementals, just don't cut it.

Then I discovered Veeam, and it's everything I would have hoped. While a graphical (GTK+ or Qt) Ui would be nice, it's not necessary. Veeam is fast, meeting or exceeding the maximum speed of Aomei, while matching its backup sizes. I've recommended it to several other Linux home users who frequent another web site at which I often post.

There is just one problem... it only allows me to create one backup job. I have a PC on my home LAN that I charitably call my backup server, though it's really just a PC cobbled together from leftover parts from other PC builds and with a lot of hard drives stuffed into it. Most of the day, it sits there in S3, until something on the LAN tries to access it, at which point it wakes up. The first backup attempt fails, but if I wait a bit and try again, it works. That's my standard go-to for day to day backups, but a single PC that's always powered on is not in itself enough. A strike of lightning or some other thing could take out my backup server and the PCs that it backs up (which are on the same electrical circuit in my house) in one fell swoop, and that would be that. I have them on a UPS with surge suppression, but I don't know that this will be enough to always prevent data loss, should the worst come to pass.

As such, I also use external, USB-powered hard drives periodically. These are kept offline in a fire-resistant box when not in use, and I stagger them-- I write a backup to one, then the next, so even if the lightning strike happens while the backup to one of the external drives is taking place, thus destroying that drive along with the drive it is backing up AND the backup server, I still have a copy in the box. It would probably be older and less up to date than the others, but at least my nearly 20 years of personal email, photos, videos, etc., would not be lost.

I tried simply editing the one permitted backup job to point the program at the correct destination, but doing that makes it always do a full backup after it has been switched, and I only have a limited amount of space on my backup devices.

When I first saw that Veeam agent free for Linux doesn't permit multiple backup jobs, I thought, "Sure, I get that... free editions always have stuff removed to get people to buy the full program." I like to support companies that actually write software for Linux, so I went to the page to check prices, and... wow. There is nothing in between "Free" and "full-on enterprise license for 10 instances," which costs $400 a year. I'm sure that's a great price for enterprise customers, but for just a guy backing up his personal-use PCs, it's just a bit steep! And on top of that, the workstation edition STILL doesn't allow more than one local/LAN backup job to be created . For that I'd have to go to the server version, even more dear in price!

Contrast that to my former backup go-to, Acronis True Image, which I was usually able to buy for $20-25 per PC after discounts and such if I found it on sale. It's a product aimed at users like me, and it allows as many backup jobs as you want. Alas, it's gotten too buggy for comfort, and I've left the Windows world behind (thanks to Windows 10), so it no longer suits my needs.

Is it possible you'd consider a home edition (not necessarily free, though I'd certainly love that!) that can have multiple backup jobs (at least three; one for the LAN share, and one for each of the two external HDDs)? I get that you don't want people using the free edition for heavy-duty business backups; you do deserve to get paid for the work you have put into your product. Surely, though, there must be a way of making sure that people using a non-enterprise version of Veeam are not trying to pull a fast one and get away with not licensing the proper version for their situation. I know enterprise is your focus, but the existing free edition with "single job" restriction lifted would be perfect, and would not take a lot of development cost on your end.

Also: Can you please not log me off while I am typing a message? I logged in immediately before starting this message, and by the time I was finished, I had to log in again (presumably from inactivity). If not for my "Form History Control II" browser extension, I would have lost this whole long message!

[PTide]

Hi and thank you for your open letter (I just can't call it "a feedback" due to its length and the amount of details ),

Your desire to keep several copies of your backups is absolutely understandable and goes along with Veeam's best practices.

I tried simply editing the one permitted backup job to point the program at the correct destination, but doing that makes it always do a full backup after it has been switched, and I only have a limited amount of space on my backup devices.

That's strange. Last time I tried it (literally 10 minutes ago with v3.0.1.1046) it worked just fine. Here is what I did for my small test:

1. Created separate SMB shares ("1", "2", "3") on a spare WIndows machine.

2. Created a simple backup job on my Linux Agent machine (Debain, only root partition included) and pointed it to share "1" (used "Shared folder" option for destination)

3. Started the job, waited for it to finish, edited destination to share "2", stared the job again, waited for it to finish, mounted "3" to a local directory (/mnt) and switched the job to send backups to /mnt, started the job.

4. At this point, having 3 full backups at different locations, I started shuffling the job destination settings randomly. Every single time I was getting incremental backup.

However, after I had changed the name of the target folder (<hostname> + <JobName>) to something else, the job wasn't able to find the original backup chain and produced another full instead.

That is, please check if the folders' names on different destinations match.

To add more, there exists a free Community Edition that goes with 10 instances that can be used for agents as well. However, there are some nuances that might be showstoppers for in you particular case - you'll need to install VBR on a separate Windows machine and either point Agent(s) to that VBR (so it can obtain license counter), or use Agent(s) in a managed mode.

Is it possible you'd consider a home edition (not necessarily free, though I'd certainly love that!) that can have multiple backup jobs (at least three; one for the LAN share, and one for each of the two external HDDs)?

I'll discuss that internally with the team.

P.S.

Also: Can you please not log me off while I am typing a message? I logged in immediately before starting this message, and by the time I was finished, I had to log in again (presumably from inactivity). If not for my "Form History Control II" browser extension, I would have lost this whole long message!

Will also check that with our web-team.

Thanks!

[ascaris]

However, after I had changed the name of the target folder (<hostname> + <JobName>) to something else, the job wasn't able to find the original backup chain and produced another full instead.

Aha! That would be it. I named the backup jobs differently so that they would be differentiated in the screen that shows all of the backup job runs and their results. Now that I know this, the limitation in question won't be as bad as I thought. I can just edit the job destination when I switch from one destination to the other.

I'll discuss that internally with the team.

Many thanks! I've been much impressed with Veeam since I started using it, and that would make it better still. I know that enterprise and cloud backup is your main focus, so I offer my thanks for the free edition that is a good fit for home users of Linux, which so far none of the other companies that have published enterprise Linux backup software have offered, to my knowledge. We're a small group percentage wise, but even 2% of the desktop market means there are millions of us out here, and having to boot to a USB rescue drive to create backups is a pain (reminds me of using Norton Ghost from the CD in the early 2000s), and precludes having it done automatically.