Well, it’s been almost a year since I reviewed Veeam Endpoint Backup… Here’s what I have learned.

Veeam Endpoint Backup has a serious issue. I was using it on a Windows 7 PC and it was always running without error. I tried to upgrade the PC to Windows 8 and it failed miserably. No big deal, I laughed, I broke out the .ISO of the Endpoint Backup that was created under Windows 7 and viola, lets restore Windows 7 from scratch. Ha, I will have my Windows 7 back up and running in no time… or so I though.

While restoring I get this lovely message from Endpoint Backup:

Restoring Drive_C (C:) Error. Failed to decompress LZ4 block: Bad crc (original crc 77330b44, current crc: 63000009). Unable to retrieve next block transmission command. Number of already processed blocks: [57243]. Failed to download disk. Agent failed to pr <stops at this point and can’t expand anymore to read the entire failure>

Well DAMN… So, I thought maybe, just maybe the hard drive I backed up to had issues [badblocks]… Ran smart [smartctl] and the drive was 100% clean. Not a single CRC, or UDMA or any type of error. The drive was just perfect. I could copy files on and off the drive with no problems at all.

It hits me… Veeam Endpoint Backup has NO VERIFICATION. It’s 100% write with NO CHECKING… Oh WTF? A backup software with NO read verification built in.

So, nice job Veeam, you have a FREE product that is worth its money. When I really needed it, it failed me. I contacted Veeam, I was not expecting anything, I mean, ITS FREE… I asked them if they would put in a “Verification” pass but was told “Endpoint backup should be using it’s own proprietary validation.” which obviously, does not work. So, in my book, Veeam Endpoint Backup has a serious problem and issue. Now, Veeam support did say that booting the backup ISO into a VM and running a test restore is a great idea to see if you can recover [yeah, but who has time to do that after every backup to see if your Veeam Backup chain is intact and working???].

The story is not all bad, I was able to just install Windows 10 manually onto the PC, and I was able to do some “file level” restores from Endpoint Backup, namely get most of my profile back. But will I ever rely on Veeam Endpoint Backup for reliable full backups, nope… Sorry… I know Endpoint is FREE software, and I got every pennies worth, but you think and feel that Veeam, who is like the gold standard of VMware backup, would not put out any software that has that kind of an issue. I know the Veeam team worked hard, but this kind of failure [and simple verification pass would have caught this long ago!] is like watching your favorite NFL player losing the championship game, Baseball player striking out, Nascar Driver hitting the wall and spinning into the inside wall upside down, on fire, eh, you get what I mean… Ok, so the mighty Casey has struck out and it was a FREE little league game, but still.

And now I don’t sleep to well wondering if my Veeam Backup & Recovery software that I use for VMware backups will ever suffer from a similar gotcha down the road. Maybe it’s a good thing I kept ghettoVCB around to do full vmware snapshots and backups.