I’ve reviewed the original “Veeam Endpoint Backup” and found some limitations, now Veeam has killed off the name of “Endpoint” and changed it to a free/paid version called “Veeam Agent for Microsoft Windows FREE” [must get the “free” in all caps since Veeam called it that].

In my previous rant, err, complaint, the issue was there is no verification in the backup chain. You didn’t know if you had a busted backup until you tried. I had to move the directory from the endpoint storage to somewhere else to let endpoint start a new full backup chain.

Looks like they added a few fixes in the “Veeam Agent for Microsoft Windows FREE”. When you set the backup and select where to put the backup, there is now an [Advanced] button. This [Advanced] button opens a new windows with two tabs, Backup and Storage. Under Backup tab, you can select the “Create active full backups periodically”. This resets your backups to a new full chain, and forces the chain to be read, all incrementals applied, and a new .VBK full backup file to be created. This is as close to a verification as you can get, because they had to read the old full chain to make the new chain. Granted, this adds considerable time, but you can select to only do this on say “the first Saturday of the month” or “every Monday”.

The other nice fix, under the Storage tab, you can now “Enable backup file encryption”. THANK YOU VEEAM! I could not recommend endpoint to some companies that fall under PCI and/or HIPAA. While I could write the backups to an external USB with bitlocker to pass PCI and/or HIPPA requirements, I could not write the backups to say a network storage or worse, a cloud storage where the files may or may not be stored encrypted/protected. Now, with this fix, you can set the password [and hint]. NOTE: You can not set a password when writing to a Veeam Repository, instead, you rely on the repository’s password to encrypted the entire repository.

I do see where some other internal improvements were made. I had some servers that would take VSS errors in endpoint once in a while, but since loading version 2, err, “Veeam Agent for Microsoft Windows FREE”, the errors have stopped. Guess “Agent for Windows” has better Windows 10 VSS understanding.

All I can say is “Thank you Veeam” as this is a step in the right direction. I still want, miss, require a verification step like Acronis has for my super critical systems, but this is still good step forward. As a free product, I recommend it for non-critical systems and hope to one day be able to recommend it for all Windows systems as it keeps improving. GOOD JOB VEEAM, KEEP UP THE GOOD WORK.