Veeam Agent for Windows and OneDrive you say? And its free!

Free is the new free.

Let’s get a bit of background to this feature that seems to have slipped under the radar, Veeam Agent for Windows 2.1 was released with Veeam 9.5 U3 to support some of the new agent management functionality in Veeam Backup and Replication console. The free version of the Veeam Agent for Windows (VAW) prior to version 2.1 allowed backup to an external hard drive, network share or a Veeam Backup and Replication server hosting a backup repository. Paid for editions of VAW also allowed backup directly to a Veeam Cloud Connect repository.

What does it look like?

Let assume you have already installed the free version of VAW 2.1 and you are about to configure a backup job.

Select OneDrive

Sign in to your OneDrive account. This can be a free tier or if you have a Office subscription, you should have at least 1TB of space to play with.

Enter username followed by the password.

Allow VAW to access OneDrive.

Take note of this warning, you could end up syncing your backup back to your computer 🙂

Open settings on OneDrive app, click account, click choose folders and then untick the VeeamBackup folder to stop it synchronising with source computer.

Define your schedule.

Done.

If you choose anything other than system state backup in the free edition, it won’t work. I tried to select some folders to backup rather than the whole machine, but you will receive the following error.

 

What is the use case?

I think this is great for home users who want a simple way to back up their home computers “to the cloud”. It is an offsite backup that requires little setup and can just sit and trickle away in the background. Encryption of the backup is now an option in the free backup, so the backup files stored in OneDrive would need to be decrypted before being put to use, for extra piece of mind.

Also, small organisations that want a simple and cost-effective way to back up offsite can leverage this.  OneDrive and OneDrive for business should be supported

Closing remarks.

One thing I have yet to test is bare metal recovery with a backup stored in OneDrive. I assume the recovery media will allow access to OneDrive to retrieve the system state backup but again this needs clarification. Individual file recovery from within Windows works great as expected.

Check out the release notes for more info and the OneDrive support documentation.

 

Ian