Microsoft left the home backup server market, is Veeam Endpoint Backup FREE about to take over?

...and they're giving Surface Pro 3 to 6 lucky beta testers.

Sounds intriguing, especially for a v1 release. I listened in to a portion of their Webinar today, and wanted to share some initial impressions, based on what I heard so far. I haven't had a chance to test it yet, but Andreas Lesslhumer sure has!

Before we get too into discussing Veeam's planned 2015 launch, or their interesting beta tester motivational strategy (pictured above and at right), let's first gain a better understanding of how tough the "IT Pro who helps out family and friends at home" market really is. What better way to look at that market than by first taking a look at what this IT Pro been doing for daily backups, for my extended family and 12 PCs, for about 8 years now. As Veeam acknowledged during their Endpoint webinar yesterday, it's typically an IT Pro or just a Computer Enthusiast of some sort that is eager to find a set-and-forget-it solution, so they don't have to spend every family holiday and weekend fixing stuff. As a long-time MSDN member, I had the opportunity to try Microsoft's various products before buying, for these past 8 years. Here's how it went.

MY HOME SERVER TIMELINE

2007 (~$100, for the OEM license key)

I've relied on Windows Home Server  since its release in November of 2007. I took a small PC, stuffed 4 1TB drives in there, and I had myself a little 24x7 home backup server. Simple flat network, a single workgroup. Created a bootable CD for those inevitable bad days, when a family member's hard drive or PC would croak, usually spectacularly. I'd simply swap in another drive, then pop in that recovery  CD. A fairly simple wizard walked me through the process of restoring from the last full backup, right over the home network. We all helped each other through the new homeservershow.com site, and the always informative and entertaining HomeServerShow Podcast community.

This product saved my skin dozens of times, giving me my evenings and weekends back. Instead of troubleshooting inevitable PC woes, I just reverted to the last known good backup. Done.

Oh yeah, it also served as a 2nd copy of all those irreplaceable family videos, about 3TB of data in all. Not a good candidate for cloud backup, nor was my internet anywhere near as fast as it is now.

Here's one  killer feature. Those backups were single instance storage. Meaning, if I had 7 copies of Windows XP on 7 PCs, the storage need wasn't 7x greater than 1 XP PC, it was instead about 1.1X. It also meant I could feel free to put bloated games on a family systems, without worrying that it might require me to add any more storage to the Home Server. Nice! And even when I did have to add storage, Home Server's Drive extender made it easy.

2011 (~$200, no upgrade pricing, process is manual)

Windows Server 2011 had some real issues with scaling, as I had grown to 12 family PCs doing daily backups, with several over a Hamachi VPN.

Here's another killer feature. Efficiency. A scheduled task wakes the remote laptop or desktop up at night, the daily backup is run, and it goes back to sleep. That whole process usually takes under 10-20 minutes, even if the PC is in a distant home. Nice!

I when all-in, moving from a physical server, to a VM running on my new ESXi based vZilla. Backup speeds stayed the same, but I did have to do some tricks with RDM mappings or USB 3.0 passthrough, to get past the 2TB virtual drive limitations of VMs back then.

Still a simple workgroup model, and no domain join required. Quite the fan of the product, I even flew to Indianapolis for a Home Server Show Meetup.

But backups and restores weren't great, very slow, so I moved quickly to...

2012 (~$400, no upgrade pricing, process is manual)

Windows Server 2012 Essentials hit the mark, but not without me having to come up with an admittedly kludgy, but also effective way around Microsoft's recent insistence with joining a domain. I don't want or need a domain login for my family PCs in my home, and I did manage to come up with a nice little workaround here. Still quite the fan of the product, and flew to Indianapolis for another awesome Home Server Show Meetup.

2013 (~$400, no upgrade pricing, process is manual)

With R2 arriving, I was quite happy to have figured out this nagging concern, once and for all, putting all DNS and Domain join issues to rest, so I can rest, see:
How to make Windows Server 2012 R2 Essentials client connector install behave just like Windows Home Server by Paul Braren on Dec 11 2013

2014

Windows Server 2012 R2 Essentials starts to stumble a bit, see also:

• Windows Server 2012 R2 Essentials – Repair the Backup Database
  by Paul Braren on Feb 12 2014
• Anybody noticing their backups stopped after some patches in October, with Backup status showing "Not set up"?
  by Paul Braren on Nov 07 2014 (at homeservershow.com)
• Windows Server 2012 R2 Essentials says backup failed due to insufficient storage available, the fix may be chkdsk
  by Paul Braren on Nov 13 2014
• Windows Server 2012 R2 Essentials complaining about one of your drives? How to queue up multiple chkdsk operations for the next reboot.
  by Paul Braren on Dec 03 2014

Wait a minute, isn't this supposed to be set-and-forget? And why did I have to do a full install for each product, with no in-place upgrade, or upgrade pricing?

Hmm.

It just so happens I was recently taking a fresh look at the way I backup my home lab's more important VMware vSphere 5.5 VMs anyway, see:
Superguide: Home virtualization lab backup software, some special deals for VMware VCPs and vExperts by Paul Braren, Nov 26 2014.

In that article, I'm leaning toward the extreme simplicity of the Nakivo OVA appliance, as it sure seems to get the job done, installs and is ready in less than 5 minutes, and simple web UI that I can easily access with my phone, using either my Hamachi iOS VPN (easy, beta) or my OpenVPN (faster speeds, free).

I also recall the tinkering I did a few months back ago, with Veeam Backup & Recovery v7, that lead to new thoughts along these lines:

• If I go ahead with trying Veeam Backup & Recovery v8, just released, will it be a bit simpler to install, patch, and configure?
• Will it handle a "hacked" home DNS configuration?

What I mean is the typical home WiFi router doing DHCP leasing duties, with no "real" DNS for proper forward and reverse lookups for local LAN devices. This means host file tweaks, which neither Nakivo or Veeam handled particularly well.

Lacking a proper DNS has me rethinking things a bit, as I prepare for vSphere/ESXi 6. Perhaps I'll just tweak the ESXi 6 VCSA appliance to also be a DNS server, we'll see. I work hard to keep things simple, it's kind of my thing. For example, you can watch me create my entire vSphere 5.5 home virtualization lab here, in just one hour.

2015 ($0)

Veeam Endpoint Backup FREE?

Here's where the light-bulbs went off. I had read Veeam's October 8 announcement:

Announcing: Veeam Endpoint Backup FREE

and as the Veeam Endpoint Backup FREE webinar got underway yesterday, Mike Resseler, EMEA Microsoft Evangelist at Veeam, was presenting. He quickly caught my attention Mike he mentioned that Anton Gostev @gostev would be in the web meeting too, answering the attendee questions, live. Anton's "the guy behind Veeam," the Vice President, Product Management at Veeam Software. He's still very often found on the Veeam forums. You'll see an enthusastic crowd was also in attendance at the webinar, where we gave Anton quite a barrage of challenging questions. My questions are seen in grey, and his answers in red, in the Q&A transcript down below.

So as Mike got into the live demo, at this spot in the YouTube video I've featured below, where he mentions:

...there are a few possibilities for destination: local drive, shared folder, and soon...you will have the option to choose the Veeam Backup & Replication repository.

That really got me thinking, what if I try Veeam Backup & Replication v8 again, but this time, it's the backup repository for both my precious VMs, and my dozen or so extended family member PCs?

Remember, an IT Pro like me is likely in Veeam's crosshairs, in that I'm a vExpert and VCP, so they've made their Veeam Backup & Recovery (part of their Veeam Availability Suite) v8 available for 90 days, for use in my home lab, by filling out this form. Getting me to use it, versus other NFR code I can get elsewhere, is the thing. That's where Veeam Endpoint Backup FREE comes in. A carrot on a stick of sorts, to possibly draw me into their software product line.

Disclosure - Veeam's advertising department does place ads on TinkerTry, as do other companies, but I don't do sponsored posts, and nobody asked me to write this, or knew I was writing this.

Pros

• free, and promises to stay free
• can backup Windows server flavors
• can have network drivers added to the USB key, or during the restore process
• sure seems they'll be likely to have some pretty darn motivated beta testers, with six rather pricey give-away for the lucky superstars
• can backup the UEFI equipped Surface Pro 3 tablet, from, of course, Microsoft
• actually has support ticket opening/diag bundle upload functionality, built right into the UI
• I don't have to use a Backup & Recovery repository, I can just use a NAS or network share

Cons

• can't do single-instance storage
• can't be centrally managed, if using a network share or NAS for the backup repository
• can't boot recover media from LAN (WS2012R2E can)
• not meant for enterprise, which also means best-effort response for any support tickets opened
• it won't ever support Mac OS X, then again, neither did WS2012R2

Challenges

• are more people going with "disposable" cheaper devices, and not bothering to worry about the day it won't work anymore, with key data backed up to the cloud anyway (Dropbox, Onedrive, iCloud Drive, etc)?
• is this merely a carrot on a stick of sorts, to woo IT Pros to Veeam's enterprise offerings (vendor lock-in)?
• if I decide I like everything in one repository by going with Backup & Recovery, what will that license cost me after the 90 day NFR runs out?
• can Veeam actually support a somewhat niche product like this, on a best effort basis, for free?

Closing thoughts

I'm not one who cares much about the size of a vendor's marketing budget. Or the effectiveness of their social media plans. I really only care about backups that work well, giving me good night's sleep, and giving my family peace of mind.

So I'll leave you with some tentative home lab testing plans, as I begin to plan for 2015.  I'll probably:

• create a thin-provisioned VM for Veeam that won't take up any more room than necessary on my precious datastore, and see how it goes..
• begin adding VMs and PCs to the daily backups, then see how it goes...
• do a full backup to PC while it's local
• give an offsite daily backup a shot too, from that same PC, but in another location, over VPN
• devise an affordable way to get an encrypted "DR site" going, in other words, a 2nd copy of all those backups in a nearby family member's basement, a personal, private cloud...

Not sure how ESXi 6.0 plans will fit into all this, we'll have to see.

Read more at Veeam Endpoint Backup – Bringing Veeaminess to your physical endpoints, and Veeam Endpoint Backup forum, and folks discussing the wait for the beta download instructions here.

Drop your thoughts/comments/suggestions/experiences below, where I'll also be letting you know how my tinkering goes.

2015 should be an exciting year here, at TinkerTry!

See also

Superguide: Home virtualization lab backup software, some special deals for VMware VCPs and vExperts by Paul Braren on Nov 06 2014

Veeam Endpoint Backup FREE, thoughts? on homeservershow.com/forums by Paul Braren on Nov 06 2014

Veaam Endpoint Backup "Feature Request - Manage backups" Veeam forum discussion

Veeam Endpoint Backup FREE Dec 04 webinar slide deck by Mike Resseler

Dec 04 2014 Veeam Endpoint Backup FREE Webinar Audience Questions (screenshot)

I asked a bunch of questions during the webinar, and I managed to capture most of the transcript, text that's searchable, down below the colorful screenshot. But it's probably easier to read the color-coded Citrix GoToWebinar Questions screenshot, with my questions in grey, and Anton Gostev's answers, in red:

Dec 04 2014 Veeam Endpoint Backup FREE Webinar Audience Questions (Text Version)

Audience Question
Q: when will Endpoint be available for download?
A: It's already available, but we are sending beta invites in stages to all pre-registrants http://go.veeam.com/endpoint

Audience Question
Q: Why is veeam sending in stages for the beta download. The more beta testers you have the better for you to evaluate a product.
A: The goal here is to ensure that our lsupport resources are not slammed by common issues we may have overlooked reported by thousands of users (we have 15000 signed up for beta). This way, everyone invited should be well covered from a support perspective.

Audience Question
Q: I was sent an invite that said I'd get a download link shortly but still haven't received it... when can I expect to download my copy?
A: It will take from 1 to 10 days, depending on your registration order

Audience Question
Q: Is this still going to be free after the Beta and is there going to be an Enterprise Version?
A: This product will remain free forever

Audience Question
Q: What about support for Microsoft Surface devices?
A: Surface Pro is supported. Mike actually uses one, and tested VEB with it ;)

Audience Question
Q: Any potential plans to tie this into the existing Veeam Backup & Replication console to provide more of an all-in-one solution?
A: This will depend on the feedback (no immediate plans)

Audience Question
Q: Where do yo udraw the line between "your endpoints" and "Enterprise?" 10 users? 25?
A: As many as you are ready to manage individually (without centralized management)

Audience Question
Q: Would you say it's a viable replacement for bare metal servers that previously used Windows Server Backup?
A: Yes, for sure. If Windows Server Backup was any good, we would not have started developing this. We've done LOTS of testing ;)

Audience Question
Q: Can you restore to another machine? Will it remove drivers or add drivers during the restore process?
A: Yes. It's called Bare Metal Recovery, Mike will talk about this later in the presentation.

Audience Question
Q: Any plans in the pipeline to support other non-windows platforms?
A: No

Audience Question
Q: Will this backup both Virtual and Physcial windows desktop/laptops ?
A: Yes

Audience Question
Q: We use Veeam 7 but have on physical 2012 r2 Domain Contoller. Will this product backup our Physical DC?
A: Yes

Audience Question
Q: I know that it says 2008R2 up has it been tested on 2003 at all. Is it possible it may work with 2003?
A: Explicitly does not work on 2003 and 2008 non-R2 due to OS limitations

Audience Question
Q: Is there ANY alerting functionality to send an e-mail? Alternatively, could you use Powershell from a central server to pull VEB logs and information from remote endpoints (Are there PoSH cmdlets)?
A: You will be able to monitor all endpoint backups centrally in the B&R console when backing up to Veeam backup repository (disabled in beta)

Audience Question
Q: Can the SystemTray icon by hidden (so that backups occur without user visibility/intervention)?
A: You can hide it with native Windows task bar settings

Audience Question
Q: What abotu backing up across LAN/WAN connections?
A: This will work on reasonably stable connections with at least a few Mbps of bandwidth

Audience Question
Q: can you backup to the cloud? Onedrive, etc?
A: VEB produces regular Veeam VBK/VIB files, you can copy them wherever you want. This includes support for B&R Backup Copy jobs to Veeam Cloud Connect providers

Audience Question
Q: will a recording of this presentation be distributed?
A: Yes

Audience Question
Q: Does it compress/dedupe backups (for space conservation, rather than only change block tracking)
A: Yes

Audience Question
Q: Will Endpoint Backup Send a notification by email if a backup fails? Is there a way to manage multiple end point backups?
A: No email notification or central management. Yes for centralized monitoring, see my earlier answer.

Audience Question
Q: Does it support RAID?
A: Yes

Audience Question
Q: Can we seed installation and updates ?
A: You can deploy and configure with 3rd party software distribution product.

Audience Question
Q: Will it backup the operating system as well as filles so you could restore an entire system to a formatted disk?
A: Yes - Mike has covered this earlier in the presentation.

Audience Question
Q: So can you restore a physical backup to a VM, do a P2V?
A: You can restore an entire computer backup to any computer with Bare Metal Recovery, Mike will talk about it later

Audience Question
Q: can you prevent uninstallation by an endpoint user?
A: Yes (there is a native Windows capability to restrict user access to managing installed programs)

Audience Question
Q: Is it practical to think of this is a possible imaging tool? To replaced a Windows WDS or Acronis?
A: Yes but don't listen to me on this one ;) better test and make your own decision!

Audience Question
Q: Will cloud connect be an option for connecting to the repository?
A: Yes, you Backup Copy VEB backups to Cloud Connect repository

Audience Question
Q: If the files are vbk, can they be imported into Veeam?
A: Yes

Audience Question
Q: Will this run as a service to backup when no user is logged in?
A: Yes

Audience Question
Q: Would it be possible to launch the software from a bootcd (i.e. Hiren's boot CD)?
A: VEB creates its own boot CD for recovery, Mik will talk about this later in the presentation

Audience Question
Q: How do I restore files or my entire os/image if I have a major hardware problem such as a bad drive? Specifically, since the console is not running of my backup source/media, would i just be able to go to another laptop and istall endpoint them from there, create the bootable media and thus restore from the backup jobs?
A: that, or import backup into Veeam B&R (unless you are already backing up to Veeam repository)

Audience Question
Q: Any APIs or powershell module to programmatically interact with the software?
A: Not in v1

Audience Question
Q: If backing up a physical server, like a DC can you restore it as a virtual machine (VMware) easily?
A: Yes

Audience Question
Q: Hi, Can i backup exchange o SQL Server whit this tool?
A: Yes for basic installs (no cluster etc.)

Audience Question
Q: When will it be avliable for download?
A: Public beta is available now, release is early 2015

Audience Question
Q: In the backupMode screen - only File/Folders says it will create an image -- are the other modes Image-based as well?
A: Yes, all backup modes create a disk image which then goes into our standard VBK format

Audience Question
Q: Can you backup open files ? (like Outlook archive)
A: Yes (courtesy of Microsoft VSS)

Audience Question
Q: Does VEB use the same backup types such as Synthetic Full, reverse incremental, etc?
A: It uses forever forward incremental mode (new and default backup mode in Veeam B&R v8)

Audience Question
Q: how do you ensure technically, drives with changing letter are recognized?
A: Absolutely

Audience Question
Q: Will this work in a server environment and if so, what about a cluster host?
A: No cluster support

Audience Question
Q: Request that you add a trigger event for X numbers of minutes after a users logs in. :-)
A: Please post all feature request on the Veeam forums (there is the dedicated VEB subforum), so that they are not lost

Audience Question
Q: Can "At Backup Storage Attach" recognize a network drive mapping (IE I'm on my network) or is it limited to physical drives?
A: Not in beta. I am hoping this will make it into v1, but devs gave me no guarantees on this one :)

Audience Question
Q: Any options to run a script at the start or finish of a job?
A: Not in v1

Audience Question
Q: Does it make sure that the last valid backup is kept, even if it's older than X day's of use? (Another backup was not run, or all have hit errors)
A: Yes

Audience Question
Q: will it work with b&r 7?
A: No

Audience Question
Q: How is your P2V compared to VMware convertor ?
A: We don't do P2V :) we do backup and bare metal restore

Audience Question
Q: If you backup an applicaton like Exchange or SQL, does the software do an applicaton aware backup, so you can restore individual elements within the application?
A: Yes

Audience Question
Q: Can you restore volumes to new hard drives that are attached via USB and then place that destination drive into a new workstation?
A: Should work - please try it with the beta!

Audience Question
Q: Will this Endpoint free be merged to Veeam Backup & replication software. Currently veeam doesn't offer physical backup software. If the goal is to merge both so you can offer one solution, then great.
A: No immediate plans, will depend on feedback and other things

Audience Question
Q: It there a way to do a restore using a bootable USB stick? Acronis has this feature I use to upgrade to larger hard drives
A: Mike is talking about this right now ;)

Audience Question
Q: Can I encrypt the backups encrypted?
A: Yes, but only when backing up to Veeam B&R repository

Audience Question
Q: any sort of deduplication and/or single-instance-storage (say 5 Windows 8.1 machines, reducing space requirements)?
A: No, individual backups per computer. However, you can always put those on Windows Server 2012 with deduplication feature enabled ;)

Audience Question
Q: When you load backup to restore do you need to have available disk space on local storage to load that backup file?
A: No, restore is direct from backup file

Audience Question
Q: Any options to choose forward or reverse incremental backups?
A: No options, the only backup mode is forever forward incremental (B&R v8 default backup mode)

Audience Question
Q: If I defragged the hard disk, will that impact the backup size?
A: No. SDELETE will help the backup size though.

Audience Question
Q: Have you tested a restore if the hard disk was encrypted with Microsoft Bitlocker or Symantec Encryption?
A: Not yet

Audience Question
Q: If this Exchange aware, does it do Mailbox Backup or is the product limited only Full Exchange Recovery?
A: You can restore individual mailbox items from VEB (using Veeam B&R)

Audience Question
Q:
it does look like the backup process the windows pagefile.sys from the test restore file viewer. Is that a limit of the volume level backup/restore?
A: pagefile.sys contents is not backed up

Audience Question
Q: are all bnackups after the first one incremental? If so, what happens if the first backup gets deleted?
A: That is correct. If you delete your backup, then you will not be able to restore ( :) )

Audience Question
Q: how do you ensure technically, drives with changing letter are recognized? - YES. but how? a (hidden) descriptor file? windows partition ID (I forgot what it's called correctly)?
A: Not a short answer this, feel free to post on the forums if you are interested in long one

Audience Question
Q: What's the required RAM and CPU for this to work?
A: System Requirements will be finalized closer to the release

Q: Is there any sort of deduplication and/or single-instance-storage (say I have 5 Windows 8.1 machines, to greatly reducing space requirements for those 5 full backups)?
A: answered earlier

Audience Question
Q: If we load the backups in to Veeam, would running from the vbk be availalbe as it is with virtual servers?
A: No. There are no VM files in VEB backups, just disk images.

Audience Question
Q: Will there be controls to manage speeds over a network?
A: When backing up to Veeam repository, yes

Audience Question
Q: Is there a max size that can be backed up?
A: No known limits (same engine as Veeam B&R)

Audience Question
Q: If I have multiple Laptops/Desktops backing up to a NAS/Share, how are the backup images identifiied...by computer name?
A: Computer name and BIOS UUID

Audience Question
Q: if you choose to make recovery disk on a usb drive (making it bootable) does it wipe the drive?
A: Yes

Audience Question
Q: Does the application write a successful or failed backup to the windows log or does it write to its own log?
A: Both

Audience Question
Q: Is there any free tier of VBR that could run a backup repo just for these endpoints? Thinking about how to back up my folks' computers.
A: No such edition. But, you can just backup to a share.

Audience Question
Q: what is expected compression?
A: usually around at least 50%

Audience Question
Q: Does the Beta version support B&R as a backup target?
A: No

Audience Question
Q: What information is sent in the support issue email?
A: Whatever you have specified in the forms + all debug logs

Audience Question
Q: How does it handle applications such as SQL & SharePoint?
A: There are no special processing for any apps (just regular VSS)

Audience Question
Q: Why did you decide to make it free?
A: Because virtual and cloud is the future anyway

Audience Question
Q: Works with BIOS and UEFI booting?
A: Yes, both are fully supported

Audience Question
Q: what's the file size of the recovery ISO?
A: 300 MB, unless you put in a lot of custom drivers in

Audience Question
Q: Is there any support for more advanced retention policies in the software? (EG GFS) I assume I could always do that by copying the VBKs manually though.
A: no built-in support

Audience Question
Q: Does the ISO/usb have to be created on a machine by machine basis or are they universal?
A: If you want to ensure flawless recovery, machine by machine basis is best, because it sucks in all the required drivers from the computer

Audience Question
Q: do you have to have an x86 and x64 verison or are they combined?
A: They are combined

Audience Question
Q: Does recovery also work on full HD encrypted workstations?
A: We have not tested this yet

Audience Question
Q: Can the basic configuration be set during installation silently?
A: we're still deciding on setup... any feedback is welcome (please post on our forums)

Q: So, very much like Microsoft Server 2012 R2 Essentials, as a backup server, other than no PXE boot (boot from LAN) of the boot media. Any chance they'll be a comparison table somewhere, someday?
Audience Question
Q: can I backup a Win 7 client and then restore to Windows 8? Is it application diagnostic? Wondering since Easy transfer Wizard was kind of discontinued in Windows 8.1
A: No. Restored is the exactly the same computer as you were backing up.

Audience Question
Q: Can I use the backup to deploy new machines?
A: Probably not (this needs sysprep etc.)

Audience Question
Q: regarding bare metal back up, is an iso needed for each machine backed up? or is only one iso required for ALL machines
A: You would be able to work with 1 ISO, but htat one won't include the specific drivers of that endpoint, and you probably would need to load drivers

Audience Question
Q: Any future plans to support backup to cloud providers like AWS or Azure?
A: No immediate plans (and we don't talk futures anyway) :)

Audience Question
Q: Able to load additional network drivers at that point?
A: Yes

Audience Question
Q: What OS's are supported?
A: Windows 7 or higher, Windows server 2008 R2 or higher

Audience Question
Q: I have read your previous comments about "centralized monitoring but no centralized management". What do you mean by centralized monitoring when used with B&R 8. If I backup to a B&R store can B&R send notification emails about the job even if the EB can't directly?
A: Not sure about this one, please follow up on our forums

Audience Question
Q: is this free to use even in enterprise for one off? such as restoring a workstation or deploying sysprep image
A: Yes, it is free, use it as you like :-)

Audience Question
Q: i think you said this could be used as an imaging tool - do we still need to run sysprep or will it take care of things like SIDs automatically?
A: You do need sysprep yes

Audience Question
Q: Does the system volumes only restore option leave all user files untouched? Like a Windows Repair
A: No, it overwrites the enitre system volume

Audience Question
Q: If we have 5 laptops in our office. If we use this free endpoint protection software from veeam. Do we need to install the software on all 5 laptops to backup ? or can we just install on one laptop as a console and backup rest of the 4 laptops ?
A: No, it is a standalone solution, so install on every laptop

Audience Question
Q: Will it truncate the logs for SQL via VSS?
A: No (but you can just use Simple Recovery Model instead - why use other modes if you are not backing up transation logs)?

Audience Question
Q: Can you do a bare metal restore to a smaller partition (assumingthe data will fit)?
A: Yes, absolutely

Q: If it's an AHCI SATA disk, that'd probably work, so the drivers that'd need manual loading would be for the new system's NIC, correct?
A: That might be an example, or a newer SSD disk, or a ... It kind of depends :-)

Audience Question
Q: Can the recovery disk/media be made available via PXE?
A: I don't know PXE quite that well to answer... if it can fed with bootable ISO, then yes

Audience Question
Q: For full system restores, will software keys for applications be applied? Or will the software keys need to be re-applied after the full restore?
A: It's an image level backup, so everything will be preserved...

Audience Question
Q: Can drivers be injected into the bare metal restore?
A: Yes

Audience Question
Q: Is there a way to recieve sucess or failed alerts emailed to the Network Admin?
A: Not in v1

Audience Question
Q: How long will the demo work? Does it expire after a period of time?
A: No, you can use it forever

Audience Question
Q: How or wehere do I get beta?
A: go.veeam.com/endpoint and register over there

Audience Question
Q: Can this Backup a Windows SBS 2011 server (Server 2008 R2, Exchange 2010, Sharepoint 2010)?
A: Yes

Audience Question
Q: So, C: drive that is greater than 2TB should be bare-metal-restorable, correct?
A: Yes

Audience Question
Q: this tool use compression to backup file, what about with deduplication, is it supported?
A: We use compression and deduplication also for the backup files

Audience Question
Q: can we test this version in a windows server 2012 r2??
A: Yes

Q: If backups are to B&R appliance instead of a NAS or CIFS fileshare, are they then single-instance-storage, taking up less space (say 10 Windows 8.1 backups)? Can it handle 10 systems?
A: Since that isn't possible yet, we are not aware of the specifics yet

Audience Question
Q: Will you consider per incident paid support?
A: Sure, based on feedback we consider anything at all. Currently no plans though.

Audience Question
Q: Can you backup to a USB and make that same USB bootable to restore using a bare metal recovery with the latest successful backups?
A: It should be possible in the GA (at least I asked) :)

Audience Question
Q: Will this support OSes other than windows?
A: No

Audience Question
Q: can this be depled via group policy
A: Yes, you can deploy and configure this via Group Policy

Q: Is there a hard limit on the number of Endpoint backups one B&R can handle? Is it based on a software enforced limit, or simply system bottlenecks?
Audience Question
Q: can we restore from backups when the official release gets released even if the back ups where careated with the beta version
A: historically, it's always never been possible with any B&R beta :) but who knows

Q: Can backups be scheduled to wake a laptop, do its daily backup, then go back to sleep again, in the middle of the night?
Audience Question
Q: Can I use Veeam application recovery free tools with endpoint backups?
A: Yes you can!

Audience Question
Q: I assume you would use the "load driver" functionality if restoring through BMR to different hardware to load the new systems drivers? Or could you create the recovery cd on the new hardware first?
A: Both ways will work equally well. But the latter makes the restore more streamlined, of course.

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