Veeam Endpoint Backup FREE release is in April 2015

I've been waiting for the release of Veeam Endpoint Backup FREE for around 7 months now. It all started with this October 2014 post by Mike Resseler, Product Strategy Specialist for Veeam:

Announcing: Veeam Endpoint Backup FREE

Here's an excerpt:

Does free mean no support?
Veeam Endpoint Backup FREE will be supported through Veeam's free product support policy. This means that Veeam will attempt to provide support for users of Veeam Endpoint Backup FREE but does not provide response goals or response guarantees for this service.

Welcome Veeam Endpoint Backup FREE!
Veeam Endpoint Backup FREE will solve the IT Pro's challenges to protect their endpoints at NO cost. And because of this, they will lower their risk of data loss.

This was followed by November's public beta, and a recent release candidate update.

Flash forward to Sunday, April 12, 2015, and you have the latest Veeam Community Forums Digest weekly email from Anton Gostev, stating:

Great news and something that does not happen very often - a brand new product release is coming! After a long beta with almost 20,000 beta testers, Veeam Endpoint Backup FREE went gold last week and we are getting ready for the launch! I really cannot thank all the beta testers enough – this was the biggest and longest beta in the history of Veeam.

Alright already, what's the date that Veeam says it'll be available for download?

Well, there's the Veeam Community Forum Post with over 12,000 views on April 9th, when Veeam's Product Manager Vitaliy S. stated:

Later this month. Thanks!

I went through the beta tests on several systems, and came up some minor issues on 2 of the 4 systems I tested. Support and I got past all the quirks in the end, and my confidence is fairly high now. On one system, I couldn't seem to get backups to use a known-good network share. This minor glitch ("Failed to get disk free space" or "Access is denied. Failed to create or open file.") was simple to work around. For the username, instead of pbraren, I typed in workgroup\pbraren, then everything then worked just fine.

I tend to test on beefy systems with terabytes of applications and data, not scrawny little VMs with few applications loaded. Let's see what happens when Endpoint Backup FREE arrives, and I have some time with the GA code.

April 14, 2015 Update

Good news, Veeam Endpoint Backup FREE has been released, see:

Veeam Endpoint Backup FREE has been released, extensive testing going well