Veeam offers free backup tool

Veeam Software has released Veeam Endpoint Backup Free, a free application that lets IT administrators remotely backup user’s Windows computers to an internal or external hard drive.

Veeam Software has announced Veeam Endpoint Backup Free, a simple and free standalone solution that enables users to back up Windows laptops and desktops to an internal or external hard drive, a NAS (network attached storage) share or a Veeam backup repository.

Veeam has a history of providing stand-alone free tools to the IT community that will solve real challenges, beginning with FastSCP, Veeam’s very first product, originally released in October 2006. Veeam Endpoint Backup Free joins the company’s wide portfolio of free tools used by over 500,000 IT professionals, which include: Veeam Backup Free Edition, Veeam ONE Free Edition, and Veeam Task Manager for Hyper-V.

With Veeam Endpoint Backup Free, IT professionals now have a simple solution for backing up endpoints, which has long been a major data protection headache,” said Ratmir Timashev, CEO of Veeam. “Veeam believes that modern data centres should be fully virtualised, but we also recognise that unlike servers, endpoints will always remain physical, and they need to be backed up as well. Plus, if the IT organisation still has a few physical servers left in their data centre, Veeam Endpoint Backup Free can help fill that gap.

When recovering, IT professionals can perform a bare-metal restore to the same or different hardware, a volume-level restore, or a file-level restore. The tool will be freely available to all, and will not require the use of any additional Veeam products: but will integrate with Veeam Backup & Replication if one is present in the environment. In this case granular or full application recovery capabilities made possible by Veeam Explorers for Microsoft Exchange, SharePoint, SQL and Active Directory are also available.

Most vendors would charge quite a bit for a tool with this level of functionality, so the fact that it is free could significantly disrupts this segment of the data protection market,” said Dave Simpson, senior analyst at 451 Research. “It’s not a full blown move into the physical data protection space by Veeam, but it does provide a good option for those Veeam customers who have virtualised all but a few servers within their data centre.

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