I’ve been trying out Veeam’s community offerings
- Backup and Replication
- Backup Agents for Windows/Linux
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Backup and Replication does what it says - it will allow you to back up any VM/PC and replicate that data to another PC or VM should the original PC/VM crash.
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Backup Agent for Windows or Linux. This is basically a good piece of backup software. When installed, it will (on the first run) prompt you to create recovery media, which you can then use to boot your PC/VM with and start recovering your data.
Since Mint is based on Ubuntu, I figured that it should also work (although unofficial and unsupported).
Basically you download the official Linux .deb package from Veeam, and issue the following commands :
dpkg -i ./veeam-release-deb_*.deb
apt-get update
After that, proceed with the installation of the Agent for Linux :
apt-get install veeam
DISCLAIMER : this is an unofficial and unsupported installation, you use it entirely at your own risk!
To test this, I opted for creating a new VM rather than overwriting the original one. The restoration process went without a hitch - mount the ISO, boot from it (from within a VM), then connect to the Veeam backup and replication repository, and start the restore process. 100%.
Windows installation is a doddle. Simply run the installer, it will waffle for a while, then, once finished, will inform you.
I haven’'t tested the restore process yet, but it should also be straightforward - boot from the generated ISO (I hope you have copied it to backup media as well 
), connect to the backup repository, and start the restore. And twiddle thumbs.
On their own the Backup Agent is also good for bare-metal backup, and here’'s where it start to get really good.
One of the options is to start a backup when the drive is plugged in (via USB) and disconnect the USB device automatically when the backup’'s finished.
This is great news as I can now have offline backups without having to worry about Cryptolocker zapping my backups. I already have an 8Tb HDD all prepped and ready to start a backup over this weekend. Going forward, will be ordering extra 8Tb’'s - and keep one for a long-term full backup storage juuuust in case.
Home users? No sweat, the community edition of the Backup Agent will work just fine should you want to back up to SMB, NAS or USB.
Company finances are not so great at the moment, so we’ll have to make do with the Community edition for now until we can afford licences and start backing up user data as well (there is another option in the Agent that it will initiate a backup as soon as it detects the presence of the Backup and Replication store).