Looking for a free Backup Tool for a small VMware environment or your Lab? Give Veeam Backup Free Edition a try!

A friend of mine was looking for a reliable and cost-effective backup solution for a small vSphere environment. He only runs three virtual machines, but of course these VMs are business critical for his shop.

So we took a closer look at the solutions offered by different vendors – and we finally decided to use the Veeam Backup Free Edition.

Here are some reasons for our decision:

• you can backup and restore an entire VM very fast and it is easy even for inexperienced users

• you can backup your VMs without powering them off

• Instant File-Level Recovery is available in the free Edition, too!!! So he can restore individual guest files directly out of his backup

• compression is reducing the size of the backup files

• hard to believe: Veeam Backup Free Edition is really free – and not only a trial, working for a dedicated time

• If you want to get rid of the limitations, just upgrade to the paid full version by simply installing a license key

Of course there are some limitations compared with the Veeam Backup & Replication Standard Edition.

But for a small environment or your homelab the Free Edition offers a lots of great features for free.

Some limitations you should know are:

• you cannot define scheduled backup jobs
• you can only backup one VM at a time
• no scripting
• incremental backups are not possible

If you want to know more about the limitations, take a closer look at this whitepaper:
Veeam Backup and Replication – Free Edition vs. Full Edition

In short, this was the best solution for his requirements – and this even for free.

If his shop continues to grow or if his requirements change it is possible to update to the paid version very easy and he has access to all the great features offered in the full version.

1 Comment

  1. Fabio

    Take a look at this script, it uses new veeam free 8 patch 2 functionality to schedule zip backups. You can backup an entire Host for free.
    http://www.itxperience.net/veeamfree-complete-backup-script-per-un-host-vmware/

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