Backup solutions

Hi there, first time posting, great community.
I have to admit that I need help doing my job, as an IT administrator.
I need a free solution for locally backing up about 50 Windows PCs (the old story, no budget for IT, try to find software).
I am using Cobian Backup 11 but had some problems lately with unpacking the backup, they need to be compressed, encrypted and split (4GB), and the tool provided by Cobian failed to restore all files.
To save space, I only back up folders like Desktop and Documents (mostly Word and Excel files) and back up to a local ftp server that syncs all files on a cloud.
After looking online, found that a lot of people use Veeam Agent, and I want to give it a try and I need some help setting it up:

  • do I use one network share (pwr protected) for all backup jobs or setup on the server share folders for each user? Does it matter?
  • Most times I need to restore or recover one file (accidentally deleted), is this an easy job in Veeam, any users here with Veeam experience?
  • from testing I’ve seen that Veeam creates 2 files for each backup job, is this safe to upload to a cloud (OneDrive), I’ve checked encrypt backup files (stupid question, but I need to be sure)
  • any other advice?

Thank you!

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This does not answer your questions in regards to Veeam, but have a look at restic. It’s free, open source, cross platform and should tick most of your boxes. Only thing I am not sure about is if it can split the files.

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Yeah, I highly recommend restic. I’m a contributor, so I’m biased, but the real winning aspect here is that you can not only do deduplicated, versions and encrypted backups of a single machine, but also all machines.

Additionally, from an office perspective, it’s nice that there can be multiple managed encryption keys, so key rotation is a snap.

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You might want to break down to your bosses what rebuilding and restoring 50 PCs would cost after a Ransomware attack. Generally the “cheap” places haven’t considered the cost of disaster recovery. Once they see those numbers, they usually free up the wallet a bit (not always that much though…)

If you are maintaining backups on 50 machines, you want something with central management. I use one called Urbackup that is free and works to create Images as well as file backups. It is cross platform and web based, but by far is more powerful in Linux due to it taking advantage of COW filesystems available there. It does however require a central server box with filestorage (although you could easily upload the backup storage to the cloud from there as well.)

Another option you could look at would be Duplicati, but that is not managed and takes some setup to get notifications for missed backups.

For your Cobian problem, try commercial zip programs like WinRAR and see if they extract all the files from the backup properly. Not sure about the splitting, might cat those together, in order, first.

Veeam works great. Backup and restoration is very fast. You can have it make a boot CD for each system, and restore from bare metal like Ghost easily.

You CAN use a single network share for all your systems, but that’ll mean one compromised system can corrupt all the other system backups, too. Safer to have a different path and login for each so they can’t see each other.

Advice: Enable e-mails, but don’t depend on them. Have some server side monitor/alert when a system hasn’t created a backup for a few days.

The VBM file is metadata. If you delete it, the next backup will be a FULL.

If you’ve got cloud storage for all of this data, it doesn’t sound like your IT budget is all that non-existent after all.

I’ve been meaning to check-out UrBackup myself for a while now. Not remotely as advanced as Veeam / Macrium Reflect, but the central management interface might be worth it.

Thank you for all of your suggestions, I’ll give restic and Urbackup a try.

I’m using the OneDrive space from an Office 365 account to back up all the machines, that’s why I only do selective backup and not a full machine. Got to fit it all in 1 TB.