What is Reddit's opinion of Veeam Backup?

From 3.5 billion Reddit comments

Yes , it can backup Live , and it does incremental backups down to the Hosts file level even . After the first backup it is just Magic ! https://www.veeam.com/virtual-machine-backup-solution-free.html

A good option for you would be running your virtual machines from your internal local disks and use VEEAM https://www.veeam.com/virtual-machine-backup-solution-free.html to replicate or backup your data to Synology NAS.

In order to achieve reliable HA you have to use something like VMware VSAN http://www.vmware.com/products/virtual-san or Starwind vSAN https://www.starwindsoftware.com/starwind-virtual-san if higher uptime is needed.

Synology is totally perfect for backups but not for HA/production so the whole chain looks like this: VSAN (production/HA) + VEEAM (backup/replication) + Synology (backup storage).

You should be backing up Active Directory on a regular basis already. While Windows Server Backup can do this, you are probably better off with something more potent, such as Veeam Backup & Replication Community Edition (Free).

Likewise, you should also already be backing up Exchange in order to flush the transaction logs on a regular basis, which would otherwise chew through your disk space in no time at all.

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If things really mess up during the upgrade, you'll have to implement Exchange Server recovery procedures. But that has been so-far unheard of around here. The CU is a complete Exchange installation and it goes through a whole battery of prerequisite checks before it even allows you to proceed. The worst case that I've read about on here is that somebody had to re-run the setup process to fix things.

As others have mentioned, VEEAM Backup and Replication Community Edition can protect up to 10 workloads for free, it's full featured. Pretty hard to go past it in small environments.

https://www.veeam.com/virtual-machine-backup-solution-free.html

Pair this with your cloud and local storage repository of choice.

Another option is Synology's Active Backup solution, no license cost, unlimited backups, this comes free with their hardware: https://www.synology.com/en-au/dsm/feature/active_backup_business

I would ditch Windows Server Backup if you can. It's a poor man's backup tool.

Veeam is the industry standard for backing up servers. If you have 10 or less servers to backup, then you can use the free version of Veeam. If you have more than 10 servers, then you would have to buy it. The free version has most of the features that the paid version has, so you can test everything out. Here's a link: https://www.veeam.com/virtual-machine-backup-solution-free.html

This seems like a weird distinction to me and I wish it was at least emphasized on the home page. It's clearly confusing if he's having to spend so much time correcting people on Reddit and the Veeam forums. On the website for CE, here's what it emphasizes:

>Use Veeam Backup & Replication Community Edition to protect up to 10 VMs — or a combination of VMs, cloud instances, physical servers or workstations. You can protect your production environment, use it in your home lab or use it for migrations at no cost. 

I'm guessing all the environments that we touch are paid as we have a service provider agreement. However, it does seems like an arbitrary distinction. Who other than a service provider is setting up and protecting less than 10 cloud and or virtual servers, anyways?

I'm not even advocating for people in this community to use it. In our org, we handle a lot of Veeam workloads and have to reach out to support pretty regularly. I also don't feel comfortable going potentially days without a backup because we're stuck on an issue we can't resolve. It's also clear to me that Veeam's excellent support is the result of a good business model that doesn't include giving man hours away for free. That being said, I have talked to support and my account manager, and they both seemed to think it's perfectly okay to used Community Edition if the client is under 10 seats. That wasn't an invitation to use support -- which I feel goes without saying.

I think this really comes down to a lack of communication from Veeam and a vision on what CE was supposed to be used for. If I was in his position, I would be pushing to put a footnote on the home page about this.

Check out the free version of Veeam itself: https://www.veeam.com/virtual-machine-backup-solution-free.html

It's still not a good example of the real Veeam product, but it can backup at the VM level, so worth looking at. You can use powershell to automate things. Could be a good combination of endpoint and VeeamZip could work for you.

Veeam Backup & Replication Community Edition is free for up to 10 devices. That means 10 VM's can be fully backed up and if you have more than 10, VeeamIP can backup the rest with no limit for free.

if you're running bare metal Windows the veeam agent is an excellent option for free.

Veeam is top level enterprise backup software for servers and their free offerings are excellent. if your Plex runs in a VM, the veeam community edition is also free and will do the essentials for free

i dont work for veeam but i believe in the product based on my experience in business environments

If you are running a Windows physical server/computer. https://www.veeam.com/windows-endpoint-server-backup-free.html

If you have a VM running any OS (Linux, Windows, etc) - https://www.veeam.com/virtual-machine-backup-solution-free.html

Actually starting with version 10 they removed that limitation with the free version. Now they just limit you to 10 workloads so 10 VMs. I use it for my home lab. https://www.veeam.com/virtual-machine-backup-solution-free.html

Edit: Here’s the blog post. I guess it was back in v9.5 https://www.veeam.com/blog/backup-replication-community-edition-features-description.html

The Veeam agent also requires the Veeam B&R server which is Windows only, so dockerizing that piece is much more involved and AFAIK requires Windows specific container implementation (someone please correct me if I am wrong), so all in all not sure Veeam is actually what you would be looking for. They do have a free version (https://www.veeam.com/virtual-machine-backup-solution-free.html) but I don't know what it's limitations are. I don't see an actual link to the video you were referencing so not sure what they are doing in order to be able to make any replacement recommendations.

You might want to check out https://www.veeam.com/virtual-machine-backup-solution-free.html

I used to do exactly what you're talking about using a completely custom script. I'd create an LVM snapshot of my root, image it, also image the EFI/swap partitions, and save the partition table using sgdisk It also had a function to restore the image to a blank drive.

Ended up being more trouble than its worth, now I use veeam to backup everything. Eventually moved everything into virtual machines and it works great.

1. Depends, how much data do you have? Are you okay with differential backups?
2. You could allow firewall rules to satisfy the needs of just the cloud backup function
3. Cloud based backups are of the absolute last restore, otherwise you'd always use your local backup first.
   3a. Did you just say DVDs????

Ah I see, sorry..I guess I pulled Vmware out of my butt. Are you using Scheduled tasks by chance to run those scripts? Veeam has a free product that you can try out too :D - https://www.veeam.com/virtual-machine-backup-solution-free.html

If this is just a small use case, I would just use Veeam Backup Free. It runs from the host. https://www.veeam.com/virtual-machine-backup-solution-free.html Otherwise, you'll need to find a good backup provider that supports Hyper-V VSS. (Microsoft DPM, Veeam, etc)

Veeam B&R would do the job just fine. Plus, they have free Community edition: https://www.veeam.com/virtual-machine-backup-solution-free.html

Regarding wiping it, a good option would be to save an image of the system fully prepped and then restore the image after testing it.

If you want to take it a step further, you could use something like Veeam to take periodic incremental backups so you don't have to take a new image or roll way back every time. There's a standalone agent version as well as a centrally managed server version, both completely free. And if needed or for kicks you can pirate the full enterprise edition.

https://www.veeam.com/virtual-machine-backup-solution-free.html

https://www.veeam.com/windows-endpoint-server-backup-free.html

This requres an image backup. Macrium reflect is an excellent choice for this as well as Veeam: https://www.veeam.com/virtual-machine-backup-solution-free.html

For cloud based file level backup check out backblaze.

From their web site:

Use Veeam Backup & Replication Community Edition to protect up to 10 VMs — or a combination of VMs, cloud instances, physical servers or workstations

Chat support also confirms it.

That's tricky. Could you use a forwarder? Same story importing from the UK? If I was just tinkering and I couldn't do that, I'd probably build something cheap/low power. Even consumer grade stuff is pretty capable these days.

Also, check out Veeam for VM backups. Pretty sure there is a free version (https://www.veeam.com/virtual-machine-backup-solution-free.html).

This is the download you should have:

https://www.veeam.com/virtual-machine-backup-solution-free.html

You install it on a Windows machine. Once installed, you add a server in Inventory. Preferably your vCenter server. Once that's done, your VM's will appear and from there you can back them up. You'll need Powershell scripts if you want to make use of automation etc in the free version of Veeam.

> If i lost my data, life would go on…sounds like a large external might be my best bet, and maybe go with two of them

See, that makes sense.

You might want to check out Veeam's free software for VM backup.

I would only add: if your VMs happen to be fulfilling a business purpose (your own or someone else's), you need to find a way to make the business cover the costs of preventing downtime for those VMs.

Because sometimes people might want something that backs up the System State and not just their PDF's + Docs?

Not sure if this has all the features you need for free:

https://www.veeam.com/virtual-machine-backup-solution-free.html

Its pretty manual (stripped down so no scheduling) but it will at least give you something while you research your options

Azure has a reasonably good solution for backing up to cloud if you have a decent connection (but you are paying per month for space used so might get out of your price range?)

If you want a professional solution (Veeam, dare I say it Backup Exec) then you are looking at a similar license cost

Also by Shared Drive on-site do you mean USB? Or just another fileshare on the VM

Can you use a software tool like Veeam to backup the VMs first, then delete all snapshots? If those machines are currently running fine and without issue, I see no reason to not delete the snapshots. Snapshots are not backups and they can really reduce the performance of the VMs as well.

Here is a script I use to find any snapshots in our environment older than 2 days.

param ( $Age = 2 )

Connect-VIServer vcenter.fqdn.domain $vm = Get-VM $snapshots = Get-Snapshot -VM $vm Write-Host -ForegroundColor Red "Old snapshots found:" foreach ( $snap in $snapshots ) { if ( $snap.Created -lt (Get-Date).AddDays( -$Age ) ) { Write-Host "Name: " $snap.VM " Size: " $snap.SizeGB " Created: " $snap.Created } }

Start with the free B&R community edition. You can license it later, if you require it. It's not very expensive and a solid product for this use case. We use it for around 30 Windows and Linux machines as well as an ESXi.

https://www.veeam.com/virtual-machine-backup-solution-free.html?ad=menu-products

Don't forget to put your drives in some sort of Raid configuration for at least a little bit of redundancy. If you don't want to buy a NAS and have hardware flying around you could also look into truenas for storage.

If you need offsite storage, there are many options for VeeamCloud providers.

>I know Veeam is reliable and free in my case (https://www.veeam.com/virtual-machine-backup-solution-free.html), but without the cloud part.

What solutions would you suggest?

Assuming you have the Veeam B&R Community edition, you can extend local backups to the cloud using Starwinds VTL. It allows to offload backups in any S3 cloud including Azure blob, keeping backups immutable and restoring VMs from blob to Azure directly (you would need a Veeam instance in Azure for that). https://www.starwindsoftware.com/starwind-virtual-tape-library-free

You can look into using Veeam Backup & Replication Community Edition: https://www.veeam.com/virtual-machine-backup-solution-free.html

It protects 10 workloads for free and natively supports File to Tape.

If you want tighter integration with Backup to Tape functions, then a paid license is necessary.

Veeam Backup & Recovery Community Edition is what you’re looking for. You can back up your entire machine or file level backup. They have a rescue disk option that will allow you to restore a full backup in case of a main drive failure.

If it's just for a few VMs I'd use Veeam Community Edition which is free for just a few. https://www.veeam.com/virtual-machine-backup-solution-free.html

Last I checked VMware Replication backs up to itself and then sends the dedup bits over the wire. It can take a lot of space.

Depending on what those VMs have on them, you could also look at writing them up as code in Terraform and/or Ansible that you can use to rebuild on demand to VMware or even Azure. After they are built, you could just restore from backups onto the newly built servers. Of course, this makes the issue more of a backups problem - where do they go and how fast can they get there.

Use a free tool (community edition) like Veeam

https://www.veeam.com/virtual-machine-backup-solution-free.html?ad=downloads

Create a backup and a recovery media. Then if needed, you can go back to the exact place that your system was when you took the backup.

#VeeamIsLove

>Is there a way I can transfer my hard drive/windows to this new m.2 ssd for free?

I can recommend Veeam Agent for Windows workstation backup. With it, you can backup data to local, external, and network storage and recover a file-level, volume, or entire system to a new physical or virtual machine. https://www.veeam.com/virtual-machine-backup-solution-free.html

I am sorry to hear of the lost of data, as this can be extremely hard to endure. Should you be able to recover the data using the information from the other posts I think it is also important to impress the importance of backups.

With your ESXi Infrastructure you can utilize Veeam Community Edition for up to 10 VMs. Follow the 3-2-1-0 model for copies of data, storage off-site, and offline to protect from ransomware.

https://www.veeam.com/virtual-machine-backup-solution-free.html

Veeam B&R Community edition is free for 10 workloads BUT it's free for more than that in VMs if you're ok with using the VeeamZIP option (no incremental backups). It might be an option. https://www.veeam.com/virtual-machine-backup-solution-free.html. I have a much smaller setup, only one host with 5 VMs and some physical servers and it's working great on a schedule for me.

Veam works good for vmware. Free and paid version

https://www.veeam.com/virtual-machine-backup-solution-free.html?ad=in-text-link

Really depends on your needs.

You can just script rsync vmware disks or rdiff root filesystem elsewhere

Think about puppet or chef if you create and destroy the same machine a lot

"Their offer looks poor" about Veeam? I'm sorry KaFKA_1410 -> That's not correct.

Veeam is by far the most integrated for VMware backups and the agents for Linux and Windows can rock out in awesome fashion.

You should use Veeam Community Edition (the free one) to let me point be proven:

Free Backup Solution - Veeam Backup & Replication Community Edition

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Tell them RICKATRON sent you!

Wouldn't you want image level backup, foreasy restore of a system exactly as it is at time of backup? So then easy to go backup would be a better fit than syncthing (which only sychronizes files/directories bit doesn't image a whole system).

I pay for acronis to make image level backups, but some free-ish products might be sufficient as well.

How do you intend to backup the vm's? By powering the guest os'es off and then backup the host? Or have the backup product make backups while they are running?

Veeam can do that as well with the free community edition for 10 workloads

https://www.veeam.com/virtual-machine-backup-solution-free.html

Or for less than 70 bick per year the most minimal backup essentials with license for 5 workloads (scales up to 50 workloads).

https://www.veeam.com/products-edition-comparison.html?ad=in-text-link

Btw I wouldn't be comfortable (anymore) putting backups on a directly connected usb drive (even if it is powered off most of the time). If it is connected for backup, it is also prone to an attack by for example ransomware. Usb drive rotation I find to cumbersome nowadays (even though it might seem easy for offline keeping, putting it in drawer somewhere else).

I feel more comfortable with a backup to a multibay nas, which has raid protection and snapshot possibilities (thus protecting against drive failure and data being changed/deleted as there are earlier read-only snapshots) and protection against bitrot. I then backup the fileshare data containing acronis backups on the nas to a remote nas, and some subset of data to the cloud.

Does it work directly with Unraid VMs? I couldn't find a page (https://www.veeam.com/virtual-machine-backup-solution-free.html didn't seem to go into detail).

Just copying a directory would have similar issues (and within a guest OS, as there are other "always open" files).

You could use Veeam B&R community edition to backup Hyper-V VMs without any downtime. It is free for 10 or fewer VM backups. https://www.veeam.com/virtual-machine-backup-solution-free.html

Have you considered Veeam Backup and Replication? It features backup inventory and works nicely with tapes. Community Edition is free to use. https://www.veeam.com/virtual-machine-backup-solution-free.html

I would suggest you look at Veeam. They have free backup software you could use for workstation and server (VMs) backups. https://www.veeam.com/virtual-machine-backup-solution-free.html

Is it file-level or volume/bare-metal backup?

I would start digging into Veeam's products. Their Backup and Replication might be what you are looking for. It can backup Linux servers to local, network, and cloud storage supporting various storage protocols.https://www.veeam.com/virtual-machine-backup-solution-free.html

>My initial goal was to have my main 'home-production' VMs running on DL380-Host1. Then every week running a backup (don't know software or VM product for this) to backup the VM files to Host2 and leave it registered but not running. A backup will also be made weekly to the NAS.

Get Veeam B&R Community Edition, a free VM backup to make VM backups. As mentioned, for backups the 3-2-1 is the best practice you should apply to your environment. With it you could manage backup and replication of a VMs to the second host in order to be able to restore VMs on the first server failure. https://www.veeam.com/virtual-machine-backup-solution-free.html

I see Veeam as an industry-leading backup solution. You can try backup VMs with Veeam for free. Its Community Edition is free for 10 VMs. https://www.veeam.com/virtual-machine-backup-solution-free.html

For how many VMs you need a backup solution?

You can go with Veeam for free if you have 10 or fewer VMs. https://www.veeam.com/virtual-machine-backup-solution-free.html

In my view, you could check if Veeam Backup and Replication fits your project. Its community edition is free for 10 VMs. https://www.veeam.com/virtual-machine-backup-solution-free.html

Veeam Agent for Linux and Windows workstations backups and Veeam B&R for VM backup of Hyper-V and ESXi servers. https://www.veeam.com/virtual-machine-backup-solution-free.html

I would suggest checking out Veeam’s data protection solution. They have free / community editions for on-premises and cloud based workloads. Also enables much easier / greater recovery options.

https://www.veeam.com/virtual-machine-backup-solution-free.html

https://www.veeam.com/backup-azure.html

Do you run agent-based backups? or is it just offline VM backups?

From what I see, you could use Veeam Community Edition which is free for 10 VMs to backup them directly to the local and network storage. https://www.veeam.com/virtual-machine-backup-solution-free.html

How many systems are you backing up? If less than 10, have you considered Veeam Community Edition? https://www.veeam.com/virtual-machine-backup-solution-free.html

Use Veeam, either Agent for Windows and Linux or Backup and Replication Community Edition in regard to your lab configuration. The Veeam Agent is serverless and free for a single backup job. B&R Community is free for 10 VMs. https://www.veeam.com/virtual-machine-backup-solution-free.html

Depending on how you see this working, perhaps you'd be better off combining 2 different tools: a long-distance Sync tool + a good backup tool. You could even run the versioning backup at the main server and then replicate that backup history to the secondary server.

If you're willing to change those servers to run Win Server 2019 as you mentioned you had available, there are some interesting options.

Storage Replica is almost exactly what you seem to be looking for on the replication side --- asynchronous, 1-way, seed-able, block-level data replication across WAN.

On the backup side, Veeam is popular and integrates well with ReFS.

I've never used Veeam, but looking at it again, it might actually be able to do everything you want by itself...

Just a heads up - Syncing files is all well and good, but you should be keeping versioned backups. What happens if a file gets overwritten and you need to restore a previous version?

With that said, I've heard good things about Veeam for backups and I've used their community edition to handle my VM backups, but it does support file level backups as well.

It might be something to look into: https://www.veeam.com/virtual-machine-backup-solution-free.html

I'd like to second that. Once the license expires, VBR will revert from Paid to Free (Community edition).

It will first have a grace period
https://helpcenter.veeam.com/docs/backup/vsphere/license_grace.html?ver=100

And then if you do not wish to pay/extend it you can just remove it to activate the community edition

>Switching to Veeam Backup & Replication Community Edition
>
>If you do not want to renew your license, you can switch to the free product version named Veeam Backup & Replication Community (free) edition. For more information, see Veeam Backup & Replication Community Edition.

Yeah I have been very happy with Veeam Endpoint for an easy way to backup families computers. Endpoint plus a external HDD and they have a easy backup solution.

If you want more complex setup they also have community edition of Veeam backup and Replication.

It is limited to 10 workloads (VM, Physical, cloud).

https://www.veeam.com/virtual-machine-backup-solution-free.html

Depending on the total number of the virtual machines, I think you could probably try using Veeam B&R Community Edition https://www.veeam.com/virtual-machine-backup-solution-free.html which is free to replicate the virtual machines from ESXi 5.5 that is still supported to ESXi 6.7. If I am not mistaking, this can be done without the need to take virtual machines down. After initial replication is finished, you can perform a one-way failover to the new hosts achieving as minimal downtime as possible.

I got it. What will surely solve the issue is exposing the remote location over iSCSI. This way, mounting an iSCSI target and LUN on hypervisor host will present remote storage the same way as a local drive, and regular export will work.

An alternative would be spinning another Hyper-V server on a remote the remote location and then exporting the virtual machine there. This approach is pretty complicated but is scriptable too.

The third and bulletproof alternative is using the Veeam B&R Community edition https://www.veeam.com/virtual-machine-backup-solution-free.html, which is free for up to 10 virtual machines to just backup the required virtual machine to SMB share and recover this machine back if needed.

Since you have just 2 VMs, you might use Veeam Backup and Replication Community Edition as it is free up to 10 VMs. https://www.veeam.com/virtual-machine-backup-solution-free.html

You can't delete checkpoints. Just shut down the VM and merge them.

To merge checkpoints:

1. Highlight VM > Edit Disk..
   
   1. Location: (select applicable AVHDX file)
   2. Merge
   3. To the parent virtual hard disk || To new virtual hard disk
   4. Finish
2. VM Settings > Hard Drive - Virtual Hard Disk: (select the merged VHDX) > OK

Unless you plan on using checkpoints, best to disable it before starting the VM:

• VM Settings > Checkpoints - Ensure box for Enable checkpoints is unticked > OK

For a VM backup try Veeam Backup and Replication. Their Community Edition is free for 10 VMs. https://www.veeam.com/virtual-machine-backup-solution-free.html

Veeam Backup & Replication, Community Édition is free for up to 10 workstations. You just point it to a file server of your choice, such as a Synology NAS.

Asigra is a horrible product, used to have to manage this a few years ago.

How about you try the Veeam community edition? This will give you a taste of what the features, and if you like it, purchase a full licence (if the community edition doesnt cover what you already need).

https://www.veeam.com/virtual-machine-backup-solution-free.html

How many VMs do you have? For 10 VMs you could run Veeam Backup and Replication Community Edition. https://www.veeam.com/virtual-machine-backup-solution-free.html

On the community edition page it says you can use it for a production environment-

" You can protect your production environment, use it in your home lab or use it for migrations at no cost.  "

https://www.veeam.com/virtual-machine-backup-solution-free.html

Is it stated somewhere else that you cannot use it in production?

Veeam Backup & Replication Community Edition is free for up to 10 VMs

https://www.veeam.com/virtual-machine-backup-solution-free.html

I was gonna look at using Veam myself as the home too... Free with this one https://www.veeam.com/windows-endpoint-server-backup-free.html

Or this for VMs - https://www.veeam.com/virtual-machine-backup-solution-free.html

Instead of backing up at the ESXi layer how about a free backup solution that works inside your Guest (assuming it is Windows)? This is the same product I use on my physical desktop at home:

Veeam Agent for Microsoft Windows FREE - https://www.veeam.com/windows-endpoint-server-backup-free.html

--OR--

This product lets you back up 10 VMs(or physical systems) for free with a bunch more bells and whistles:

https://www.veeam.com/virtual-machine-backup-solution-free.html

NFR has certain eligibility requirements that not everyone meets... Community Edition is more appropriate for your case: https://www.veeam.com/virtual-machine-backup-solution-free.html

Check out veeam Community Edition. It's their full standard edition, free as in $0, fully featured. Support is best effort, but even that is usually decent.

10 vm limit, license prohibits msps from deploying it to clients.. But you're staff, so check it out..

https://www.veeam.com/virtual-machine-backup-solution-free.html

The other option is to find a veeam cloud service provider and rent the software from them. It's quite cheap.. Disclaimer - am a CSP myself..

While we could why don't you just run the new Veeam Community edition? Here it's fully functional for 10 or fewer Virtual/Physical servers - the only drawback is no support but as our experience of support is : send us the logs, delete the backup chain and create from new : it shouldn't be a loss.

I've used the Veeam Free edition for this in the past. Works great! https://www.veeam.com/virtual-machine-backup-solution-free.html

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You'll get the backed up machine and you can just add the second vCenter and restore.

Are you using Veeam Backup & Replication Community Edition? AFAIK it supports scheduled backups for up to 10 VMs. Otherwise no, I think the point of VeeamZIP is that you can't really automate it, they want you to buy the full product to get that functionality. You could also run the Veeam Agent for Microsoft Windows (or Linux) inside your VMs, which supports individual scheduling. Or some combination of Veeam B&R And Veeam Agent.

I am from Veeam.

Yes, legally speaking, NFR is designed strictly for certified professionals, even if we don't validate your claim of having the specified certification. It is up to you if you want to thank us for our great software by providing false information and violating EULA terms :) many people choose to do that regardless, because they don't know that every time they do this, a kitten dies.

For homelabs, we do provide the Community Edition, however I understand you have more VMs than it is allowed to protect.

Veeam community edition should get you going.

https://www.veeam.com/virtual-machine-backup-solution-free.html

VMware needs to be licensed (not free), but if you have vCenter then you meet the requirement.

The upside being that you can just buy licenses and plug them in later.

If you are using the free version of ESXi, Veeam offers a free product specifically for it. Check it out: https://www.veeam.com/virtual-machine-backup-solution-free.html

You don't have a lot of the automation features, and you will need to manually trigger backups/recovery - but it is better than nothing!

You're talking about this right? As far as I can tell it's only for ESXi and Hyper-V. I'm not looking to backup VMs, but rather I want to backup my file server.

No, this one is Endpoint/Agent (the one I'd go with), this one is B&R's free alternative often called VeeamZip.

You should be able to restore a VM from backup with VeeamZip using the console. To restore with Agent you create a new VM and boot the recovery media ISO that agent created, then pick the restore point.

veeam endpoint is loaded onto your VM. However there is a free version of veeam backup and replication which would be installed onto a veeam server (vm or physical) however it has serious limitations compared to the paid product.

https://www.veeam.com/virtual-machine-backup-solution-free.html

With the free version there isnt. Vcenter allows you to do it with GREAT ease. There is also a 3rd party program Veeam which is very popular. Not sure what their free soluton is https://www.veeam.com/virtual-machine-backup-solution-free.html

Seems like it requires Vsphere which is a paid thing. Vmware offers a program which you can get all there programs for a $200 a year fee. Worth it if you use it in a serious enviroment.

Give this a go https://www.veeam.com/virtual-machine-backup-solution-free.html

I use (and implemented) the Enterprise Plus version at work. IMHO its best backup solution I've ever used.

If you are doing ad-hoc backups this is pretty awesome.

Not true. I suggest you take a look at Veeam Backup Free Edition 9.5. Works incredibly well with hyper v or VMware products, the free one just doesn’t offer some of the more enterprisey components like veeam cloud connect or instant vm recovery.

Veeam free backup

I’m not a Veeam rep just an end user With experience using the software at work. Have yet to find a better virtualization backup solution out there, and would be surprised if one exists.

If you're using HyperV you don't want to use checkpoints I'm told. It turns your vhdx files into differential disks instead which severely impacts performance.

Personally I use the free version of Veeam to fully backup my VMs. All my VMs are more or less only the OS itself since all of my real storage is on my NAS.

Now for the automating part you would have to do that in powershell since the free version of Veeam does not allow for any kind of scheduling in the client itself. I was told by a Veeam rep that it was pretty easy to do with powershell at least.

Edit: I am assuming your server 2016 is virtual. If it isn't Veeam also offers a free version of their Windows backup for physical servers.

https://www.veeam.com/windows-endpoint-server-backup-free.html

Or

https://www.veeam.com/virtual-machine-backup-solution-free.html

If you are in a Trial period of vSphere and have full functionality you could download VeeamZIP and backup and restore to new datastore after deletion. I have done it before works great. If you don't have vCenter it can be a pain to download and upload files. It takes a long time. https://www.veeam.com/virtual-machine-backup-solution-free.html

It works would be the first point. If I remember for VDP, you were limited to the storage size, and would have to launch multiple appliances.

The free edition has some limited SQL/Exchange/SharePoint explorers. Check it all out at https://www.veeam.com/virtual-machine-backup-solution-free.html

sounds like the backup is a dud. i use veeam here in the office. free for unlimited backup n restore. addlt features incl scheduling for pay.

https://www.veeam.com/virtual-machine-backup-solution-free.html?ad=menu-products