For over 3 years now I have been using a brilliant and free backup solution for myself and many of my customers:
Veeam Agent for Windows (formerly Veeam Endpoint Backup)
One brilliant point is that it works from Windows 7 SP1 and Server 2008R2 SP1 onwards. Yes, you read that right: Server too!
Furthermore: it creates an emergency medium (.ISO/CD/USB stick) with which you can perform a bare-metal restore. Of course, individual files can also be restored from a backup.
Free of charge? What’s the catch?
Veeam is the market leader for backup in virtualization environments (VMware vSphere/ESXi and MS Hyper-V) and saw a gap in the backup of physical machines.
Catch? None!
Yes, I know, that’s hard to believe!
Optionally, extended licenses can be purchased, e.g. to integrate into an existing backup infrastructure for VMs.
But this is often unnecessary, as it backs up seamlessly to SMB shares (NAS) and local drives. RDX in particular has grown on me over the years. Removable media, including in “rotation”, are supported by Veeam!
It has already saved a few of my customers’ bacon. I’ll just mention here the lovely application emails with a built-in crypto trojan. No big deal, because before the customer even opened the email, the backup and the volume shadow copy had already run. I simply restored the last backup completely using the emergency CD.
I also use it in stubborn cases when migrating from HDD to SSD. There are some systems (UEFI) that stubbornly resist migration using truly proven tools like MiniTool Partition Wizard — they simply won’t boot afterward. Solution: Install Veeam — Backup — Bare-Metal-Restore — Boots! Takes a bit longer, but it works.
Moving to new hardware? No problem! P2V? Of course!
The product page also has plenty of documentation.
The support forum is here.
In particular, this forum post “Evaluation Veeam for Windows - my findings” is recommended reading!
So don’t forget: NO BACKUP — NO MERCY!
What? No Windows? Linux??? Veeam Agent for Linux FREE