Hitchhikers Guide

to Veeam Backup &

Replication
Community Edition

Kirsten Stoner,
Technical Analyst,
Product Strategy
Hitchhikers Guide to Veeam Backup & Replication Community Edition

Contents
Why use Veeam Backup & Replication Community Edition? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3

Getting started with BACKUP. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4

Protecting physical machines. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8

Multiple copies of data. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10

VM copy for VMware. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10

File Copy Job. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10

Replication . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11

Backup Copy Job. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12

Quick Migration for VMware. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13

The importance of recovery. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14

Entire VM recovery. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14

VM file recovery from backup. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16

Guest File Restore. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17

Item-level recovery with Veeam Explorers . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 18

Veeam Explorer for Storage Snapshots . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 18

Veeam Explorer for Microsoft SQL Server . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19

Veeam Explorer for Microsoft Active Directory . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 20

Veeam Explorer for Microsoft Exchange . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21

Veeam Explorer for Microsoft SharePoint . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 23

Veeam Explorer for Oracle . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 24

Direct restore to AWS, Microsoft Azure and Azure Stack . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 25

More Community Editions! — Veeam ONE and Veeam Backup for Microsoft Office 365 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 27

Get started today!. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 28

About the author. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 29

About Veeam . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 30

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Hitchhikers Guide to Veeam Backup & Replication Community Edition

Why use Veeam Backup & Replication

Community Edition?
Businesses and individuals alike rely on using and accessing their data, whether it be for critical business
operations or for entertainment uses. The modern user requires 24/7/365 data accessibility. One of the
ways to achieve this is to ensure there is a way to protect critical applications and their data from failure.
Veeam® Backup & Replication™ Community Edition is a free backup solution that allows you to protect
and manage data, ensuring it’s available when you need it most and that you are able to meet the
demands of the modern business.

Community Edition is intended to be used by IT pros, whether for their home lab or to provide backup for
small businesses, with the ability to protect up to 10 workloads (i.e. physical machines, virtual machines
or even workloads running in the cloud) or 500 GB of NAS unstructured data for free, with industry-standard
backup functionality. Historically, Veeam has always provided free editions of its products to the tech
community, introducing its first free product to the community in 2006, and since then has continued this
popular tradition. Community Edition provides several powerful backup features capable of protecting your
environment and is not limited to backup functionality, as free Community Editions are also available for Veeam
ONE™ and Veeam Backup for Microsoft Office 365. This paper will describe the key features and capabilities
that you can use to efficiently protect your data.

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Hitchhikers Guide to Veeam Backup & Replication Community Edition

Getting started with BACKUP

Community Edition provides image-level backup that can serve as a base for a variety of quick, easy recovery
tasks. Backup can be considered the start to any data availability strategy, serving as the base for recovery.
No one has ever said, “I wish I never took that backup.” However, as we all know, the complete opposite
scenario is often the case. To avoid data loss, it is important to have a reliable, recoverable backup. Within
Community Edition there are two ways you can do this — one is through a scheduled backup job and the other
is an ad-hoc backup operation called VeeamZIP™. Let’s first discuss the scheduled backup job and then we can
briefly discuss VeeamZIP, which can only be used for VMs running in your environment.

As a reminder, before we get started, if you need system requirements and instructions on how to install
Community Edition, please refer to the user guide. Once Community Edition is installed and your virtual
or physical environment has been added, you can start backing up your workloads. If you’re protecting physical
machines, depending on the OS, you will need to utilize the Veeam Agent for Microsoft Windows, Linux or Mac.
If you choose to manage your physical machines within the backup console, you will first need to create
a protection group that will allow you to deploy agents to these machines centrally (we will discuss this further
in the Protecting physical machines section of this paper). Another option you have regarding protecting
physical machines is manually deploying the agent on each machine and managing them standalone.

When it comes to protecting virtual machines, you will need to add the VMware vSphere or Microsoft
Hyper-V environment to the backup server. Next, you need to decide where you want to store your backups.
By default, during installation of Community Edition, Veeam creates a backup repository on the backup server itself.
You can store your backup data there, however this is not recommended because it can quickly run out of space. If you
do choose this option, be sure to add enough disk space to your backup server. Another option is to add additional
repositories to the backup server. The types of backup repositories supported include directly attached storage (DAS),
or network attached storage (NAS) .Once you’ve decided which storage type you would like to use, go to the inventory
section of the backup console and add the storage repositories under the backup repositories node.

Figure 1: Adding backup repositories

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Hitchhikers Guide to Veeam Backup & Replication Community Edition

The above screenshot shows the types of repositories you can add into the backup server supported
by Community Edition.

To secure your backup data, consider using a backup repository that is immutable. Immutability by definition
means a solution that prevents data deletion or modification from the storage. This is achievable within
Community Edition by using the Hardened Linux Repository. This can help make sure that data is not corrupted
or compromised, there is no accidental deletion, and no modifying or deleting of restore points. If you decide
to utilize the Hardened Linux Repository for your backups, first you want to make sure that you check the
prerequisites to make sure you are following the proper configuration and it is supported within Community
Edition. For this option, you will need to switch on the immutability setting while you are configuring through
the backup repository wizard.

Once you have the backup infrastructure set up, you can start creating backup jobs. Creating a backup job
in Veeam is simple and just works. You can do this right through the home screen in the backup console. Just
click backup and follow the steps of the wizard.

When taking a backup with Community Edition, by default, on the first run of the job, Veeam will create a full
backup (VBK), with each subsequent run being an incremental (VIB). To perform an incremental backup,
Veeam utilizes Change Block Tracking (CBT). This allows Veeam to scan the machine for only those blocks that
have changed since the last backup session. Depending on the hypervisor you are using, the mechanism behind
Change Block Tracking differs. When it comes to full backups, Community Edition has two ways of creating
these full backup files. The first is the active full, which is created automatically on the first run of any backup
job. With this type of backup, Veeam retrieves the full data from the source VM, compresses and dedupes
it, then stores it as a full backup file on the repository storage. The second way Veeam creates a full backup
is called the synthetic full. The synthetic full operation won’t retrieve VM data from the source but instead
works with the existing backup chain you have on the repository storage. Using the full backup file and any
incremental backups that were included in the backup chain, Veeam will consolidate the data from both,
resulting in the creation of a new full backup file.

When creating a backup job, you will notice that the backup wizard is very intuitive and does not have
unnecessary complexities. When you reach the storage section of the backup wizard, you will notice there
is the option to define advanced settings. These settings allow you to choose between the different methods
on how the backup chain should be stored in the repository. The different backup methods include forever
forward incremental, forward incremental with synthetic or active full and reverse incremental.

The first backup method mentioned is the forever forward incremental option. This method produces a backup
chain that consists of the first full backup file and then a set of forward incremental backup files following it.
To keep the job using the forever forward incremental backup method, do not set the job to create an active
or synthetic full periodically. Therefore, the job will continue to create incremental restore points. When the
set retention policy is met, the oldest increment created will be injected into the original full backup, moving
it over one spot in the chain and discarding the old restore point.

The second method, forward incremental, will create a full backup file and a chain of subsequent incremental
backup files. If selecting this option, you need to create an active full or synthetic full periodically. This gives
the backup chain potential to contain multiple full backup files at a point in time during the retention period.
This is the key differentiator between the forever forward incremental and forward incremental methods.

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Hitchhikers Guide to Veeam Backup & Replication Community Edition

The last backup method you could use is the reverse incremental backup method. This method is a bit
different than the other two. This backup chain consists of the last full backup file and a set of reverse
incremental backup files preceding it. As a result, the most recent restore point in the backup chain is always
a full backup and gets updated after every successful backup job session.

Figure 2: Choosing a backup method

Community Edition allows you to set a schedule to define when you want your backup jobs to run. You can
choose to schedule the job to run daily, weekly, monthly or periodically based on your desired retention
policy. Once you have decided on a schedule and run the job, you have officially created one of many backups
of your data. Having a backup on hand is important because if an item gets deleted, an application goes down
or an entire data center gets wiped out, the backup is going to be used to restore your data.

VeeamZIP is another option you have when creating a full backup file that is only available for virtual machines
running in your environment. VeeamZIP is like running a regular backup job, with the main differences being
the operation only creates a full backup file and you are not able to create a schedule for the job to run.
Since it only creates a full backup file, VeeamZIP acts as an independent restore point and requires minimum
settings. This would be a good option to use when it comes to virtual machines that need to be backed up but
lie outside the 10 workloads maximum allowed within Community Edition. This gives you the ability to back
up as many virtual machines you need for free forever. To perform a VeeamZIP, switch to the inventory view
in the backup console and search through your virtual environment for the machine you would like to back up.
Once found, you can simply right click on the machine and select VeeamZIP.

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Hitchhikers Guide to Veeam Backup & Replication Community Edition

Figure 3: VeeamZIP

Once selected, you can see in the figure below there are minimum settings available to perform the operation.
You can choose the backup repository, enable backup encryption, select the compression level, use guest
quiescence and have the backup delete automatically.

Figure 4: VeeamZIP backup settings

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Hitchhikers Guide to Veeam Backup & Replication Community Edition

Protecting physical machines

Not everyone is 100% virtualized, with physical machines still being used in some capacity in businesses.
Along with ensuring you can restore virtual machines, it is equally as important to protect physical machines,
whether they are desktops or servers. Community Edition allows you to manage and back up computers
protected by Veeam Agents through the backup console. This allows you to protect your ENTIRE
IT environment, virtual or physical, right through the Veeam backup console.

To get started backing up machines using one of the Veeam Agents, you will first need to create a protection
group in the Backup Inventory section of the backup console. Protection groups can consist of individual
computers, Microsoft Active Directory objects, computers from a CSV file or computers with pre-installed
agents. When creating the protection group of individual computers, Microsoft AD objects or CSV file, you
can set the agent to be installed automatically on machines included in the group from the backup server.
When building a protection group around computers with pre-installed agents or protection groups with
flexible scope, as the name entails the protection group won’t automatically install the agent on the machine,
as it would be pre-installed manually on each machine. This means that you must deploy the Veeam agent
on the computer and configure the Veeam Agents to connect to the backup server. This option is only
applicable for Mac computers that you plan to protect with Veeam Agent for Mac.

The protection group gives you additional options for the Veeam Agents that you can set including: have the
agent auto-update when new versions are available, install the change block tracking driver on the server and
even have it perform a reboot automatically, if required.

Figure 5: Creating protection groups

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Hitchhikers Guide to Veeam Backup & Replication Community Edition

The figure above shows some of the settings available during group creation. It includes when you want
to schedule the backup server to rescan the group to ensure all machines are online and can be contacted,
as well as which server you want to be the distribution server. By default, it will be the backup server, however
you can use a dedicated distribution server to reduce workload on the backup server, if needed. Other settings
include, if you want to install the agent automatically after group creation and if you want the agent to auto-
update. Once you’re finished working through the wizard, the discovery process will start for the protection
group. For machines with Microsoft Windows OS, this process will install the Veeam Installer Service on every
computer added to the protection group. Once the agents have been installed on the designated machines,
you can start creating backup jobs based on your protection groups. To create backup jobs, you will follow
the same steps that were described previously, but instead of choosing to create the job, based on virtual
machines, you will choose Windows, Linux or Mac computer instead.

Figure 6: Selecting type of backup Job

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Hitchhikers Guide to Veeam Backup & Replication Community Edition

Multiple copies of data

It’s important to have multiple copies of your data created in case one copy gets corrupted or is inaccessible
for recoveries. Having multiple copies aligns to the well-known industry standard of the 3-2-1 Rule. For
those of you reading that do not know what the 3-2-1 Rule is, it means three copies of data, on two different
media, one of which is off site. To achieve this, Community Edition includes features such as replication,
backup copy and VM copy. These options will help your business meet this rule and ensure you always have
a copy of data available in case of the occurrence of an unexpected event. The features listed are all similar
in the fact that they create another source or copy of data, whether it’s simply a copy of data or a fully
functional VM in a ready-to-start state (replica). Even though they achieve some of the same goals, they are
fundamentally and technically different.

VM copy for VMware

With Community Edition, if you are running VMware, you can run a VM Copy Job. A VM Copy Job
creates an independent copy of a VM or VM container on the selected storage. This can be helpful
if you’re in the process of moving data centers or interested in creating a test lab. Although very similar
to replication, a VM copy is different. The VM copy is a one-time process meaning that every run of the
job, the VM copy mirrors the state of the VM, therefore the process doesn’t support incremental runs.
This also means there is not a chain of restore points for a VM copy, as each scheduled run of a VM copy
job will overwrite the existing copy. Also, a VM Copy Job is only stored in a thick disk format and has
no failover or failback possibilities.

File Copy Job

Along with being able to copy VMs on storage, you can copy just files. This feature allows you to select from
the different datastores of a specific file, then copy the file to a destination of your choosing. You can open,
view and edit the file if needed. This is done through an interface similar to Windows Explorer, making it easy
to use, especially if you’re familiar with Microsoft Windows. This can be done manually or automatically
through a defined schedule.

To get started creating a File Copy Job, you will need to perform the following steps. Go to the files section
in the Veeam backup console, select the server where the VM file resides, click the VM folder and you will see
all the files that make up the VM. You can open, edit and copy the file from this view.

Figure 7: Editing a .VMX file

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Hitchhikers Guide to Veeam Backup & Replication Community Edition

Replication
Replication is a feature available that can be used when strategizing disaster recovery/business continuity
plans, as well as be used to meet the 3-2-1 Rule. Replication allows you to create an exact copy of the VM in its
native format and then maintain the copy in sync with the original VM. Replication is recommended to be used
for your most critical VMs because it will help achieve the best recovery time objective (RTO) values.
Replication from the backup console is only available for virtual machines. To perform a replication job, simply
select replication job, choose a name, decide if you want to describe your DR site and then continue through
the wizard. The wizard will then require you to define the destination for the replica, you can choose a host
or cluster, the resource pool you want it to reside in, the VM folder and datastore.

Figure 8: Choosing your replica destination

The ability to replicate your data ensures that you have multiple copies of data available when needed.
When using Veeam replication, you have the option to also operate assisted failover and failback, in addition
to a planned failover. Failover is needed when there is a hardware malfunction or operations fail on the
machine. Failover allows you to use a replicated VM to assume the role of the original VM. Even with
Community Edition, this is a temporary step that would need to be further finalized. To keep it simple, failover
is the process of switching from the original VM to the replica VM when a disaster occurs. Failback is the
reverse, meaning you’ve already failed over to the VM replica and now you want to go back to the production
VM. When you perform a failback, you shift back from the VM replica to the original VM, transfer your
I/O processes from the target host to the production host and return to the normal operation mode. This will
also transfer any data that was created over to the production VM while the VM was in a failover state.

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Hitchhikers Guide to Veeam Backup & Replication Community Edition

Backup Copy Job

The Backup Copy Job allows you to create copies of your existing backup data. This is an easy way to create
several copies of your backup data and store it in different locations, whether on site or off site. To reduce load
on the production storage, the Backup Copy Job utilizes the backup file itself to create the copy. This job runs
permanently in the background, checking on the backup data to see if any new backup data has been created
and if it has, the job will start copying this data and transferring it to the target location.

Figure 9: Backup Copy Job schedule settings

An option you have when creating backup copy jobs is the ability to set a GFS (Grandfather-Father-Son)
retention scheme. In this scheme, weekly backups are known as sons, monthly’s as fathers and yearly
as grandfathers. Defining a GFS retention scheme to your backup copy job allows you to keep full backups
weekly, monthly and yearly, helping you retain data for longer periods of time using a minimum amount
of storage space.

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Hitchhikers Guide to Veeam Backup & Replication Community Edition

Quick Migration for VMware

Quick Migration for VMware is an operation that allows you to migrate VMs between ESXi hosts and
datastores. If you don’t currently have the option available to utilize a feature like VMware vMotion, this
is a great alternative to achieve a similar function. To relocate VMs, Veeam utilizes its proprietary SmartSwitch
technology. This capability allows for background migration of VMs, ensuring continuous uptime of your
virtual environment. It supports hot and cold VM migration. During the migration of a VM, three critical steps
are taken. First, Veeam will copy the VM configuration (.vmx) to the target host and register the VM. Then,
a VM snapshot is triggered that copies the VM disk content to the new destination. Finally, the VM state and
changes are moved to the new location. It is important to also understand that there are different approaches
to this operation, depending if you’re moving the VM between hosts with compatible and non-compatible
CPUs. If you’re moving a VM between two hosts with compatible CPUs, Veeam will use the SmartSwitch
technology mentioned previously, suspending the VM to move its state file and changes made after the
snapshot creation, with the VM being resumed on the new host. This method ensures minimum possible
VM downtime during migration. If moving between two hosts with non-compatible CPUs, Veeam will stop the
VM, move the changes over after a snapshot creation and then start the VM on the new host.

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Hitchhikers Guide to Veeam Backup & Replication Community Edition

The importance of recovery

Often, we put a lot of emphasis on backup, but when it comes down to it, a backup is only as good as its
ability to recover. The ability to recover data from a backup is the best solution to minimizing data loss. Not
only does Community Edition give you multiple methods to back up and make copies of your data, it provides
several ways to restore. To achieve an optimal disaster recovery solution, the focus should be on mirroring
your environment, which is where you can benefit from features like replication. Other features, like Instant
VM Recovery® can boot the VM right from the backup file itself, giving you one of the fastest means
to restore an entire virtual machine. Community Edition offers a number of recovery options along with Instant
VM Recovery, including Instant VM disk recovery, entire VM recovery, VM files restore, virtual disk restores,
disk export and guest OS file recovery.

Entire VM recovery
If the primary VM fails, you can restore the entire VM from the backup file using Community Edition. With
Community Edition you can perform an entire VM recovery in a couple different ways, including full VM recovery,
Instant VM Recovery or performing a quick rollback. When performing a full VM recovery, Veeam acquires the
VM image from the backup and restores it back to production. You have the option to restore it to the original
location or to a new location. If you choose to restore to the original location, during the restore, the old VM will
be shut down and deleted. When performing an entire VM recovery, the process takes time to complete and
can be more resource intensive, but once the machine is recovered there are no further actions that would need
to be taken. An additional option is to perform a quick rollback. A quick rollback is simply an incremental restore.
It utilizes Change Block Tracking (CBT) to restore only the changes that occurred on the machine from the latest
restore point (or chosen restore point that you decide you want to rollback to).

Quick rollback is useful because it does not take the same amount of time and resources as an entire
VM recovery would. Instead of restoring the entire virtual disk, the quick rollback feature will only recover
the needed blocks to revert the VM to the state that is stored in the selected restore point. Basically, when
performed, only the changed blocks are transferred back. To perform this operation, make sure you check the
box (highlighted in red) in the restore mode section of the Restore Wizard.

Figure 10: Quick rollback

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Hitchhikers Guide to Veeam Backup & Replication Community Edition

It is important to note that quick rollback should only be used when restoring a VM after a problem has
occurred at the guest OS level. It is not recommended for any restores that are needed after host or storage
hardware issues have occurred.

The third option you have regarding entire VM recovery is Instant VM Recovery. Instant VM Recovery
is a good choice if you need to restore quickly, with minimal downtime. Instant VM Recovery provides the
ability to immediately restore a VM into the production environment by running it directly from a backup file.
This functionality allows data from any workload to be restored to any supported hypervisor. To achieve this,
Community Edition uses the Veeam vPower® technology. The benefit of using Instant VM Recovery is that
it significantly improves recovery time objectives (RTOs). Since the instantly recovered VM is running from the
backup file, it is important to note that it does require additional steps to be completed. To finalize recovery,
you will just need to migrate the restored VM to production.

Instant Recovery can also instantly restore VM Disks directly from the backup file This is useful in situations
when the VM disks becomes corrupted, if you don’t want to recover the entire VM, or if you want to recover
the VM disks while keeping the target VM turned on. This will also require further finalization through
migrating to production.

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Hitchhikers Guide to Veeam Backup & Replication Community Edition

VM file recovery from backup

If a VM file (.vmdk, .vmx, etc) accidentally gets deleted or corrupted, Community Edition can restore these
files. This is just one of many ways that you can perform a restore without necessarily having to restore
the entire VM. When performing this type of restore, there are only two requirements: the backup
of the VM file you want to restore has at least one successfully created restore point and two, the server
on which you plan to restore the VM files from is added to the backup infrastructure. To restore a VM file,
you will need to select Entire VM restore in the restore wizard. This will make the option to perform
a VM file restore available in the wizard.

Figure 11: Entire VM restore options from backup

Once selecting VM file restore, you will be able to choose the VM backup, the restore point, the files you want
to restore and their destination.

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Hitchhikers Guide to Veeam Backup & Replication Community Edition

Guest File Restore

Often, a whole VM restore is not needed and in certain situations, you may only need to restore certain items
or files. Community Edition gives you this option through the Guest File Restore capability. This allows you
to restore individual guest files and folders from VM backups and/or replicas. This is done from an image-level
backup and does not require you to extract the VM image to a staging location prior to performing the restore.
You can restore files and folders to the necessary point in time, if needed. File-level recovery works with any
file system, so if needing to recover a file from FAT, NTFS Linux or a Windows machine, you can also achieve
this when using Community Edition. To restore from the varying file systems, Veeam has different methods
of technology of performing this, but they’re all completed through the File Restore wizard.

Figure 12: Guest OS File Restore wizard

Using this wizard, you’re able to drill down into different folders and find the item you are looking to restore.
This is a great tool to use that will allow you to restore the file back to its original location or copy the file
to a different location.

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Hitchhikers Guide to Veeam Backup & Replication Community Edition

Item-level recovery with Veeam Explorers

Community Edition also allows you to use item-level recovery techniques to perform application item restore.
This comes in the form of our Veeam Explorers™ and there are several available for different Microsoft
applications. With Community Edition, you can use Veeam Explorers for Microsoft Active Directory, SQL,
Exchange, SharePoint and Oracle, as well as Veeam Explorer for Storage Snapshots. To utilize the explorers,
when performing a backup/replica job, you need to make sure you enable application-aware processing. This
is recommended for VMs running applications that support Microsoft Volume Shadow Copy Service (VSS).
By enabling this option, Veeam creates a consistent backup without impacting the performance or services
the application provides. Further, the explorers are included with Community Edition, so you do not need
to separately install them.

Veeam Explorer for Storage Snapshots

Veeam Explorer for Storage Snapshots leverages storage snapshots as recovery points to allow for low
recovery point objectives (RPOs). The Explorer allows users to maximize storage investments by utilizing
them to perform recoveries. Storage Snapshots are a point-in-time copy of data that can be taken quickly
and reverted to, if needed. However, it is important to not only rely on snapshots, as they are not officially
backups. Organizations can take storage snapshots throughout the day, with little to no impact on their virtual
infrastructure. From these snapshots, Community Edition can restore entire VMs or individual files as needed.

To get started with Veeam Explorer for Storage Snapshots, switch to the storage infrastructure view
in the Veeam backup console. This is where the desired storage system will be added to perform snapshot
operations. To do this, simply use the DNS name or IP address with the proper credentials and Veeam will scan
the storage volumes to discover snapshots. As your storage array continues to take snapshots throughout the
day, Veeam will then auto-discover the snapshots as they are created, allowing for multiple restore points
to recover from.

Figure 13: Recovery options with Veeam Explorer for Storage Snapshots

Veeam Explorer for Storage Snapshots helps reduce complexity when restoring and requires just a few simple
steps when recovering VMs and items. With Community Edition, several recovery options are available from
storage snapshots, including the entire VM, VM guest OS files, Microsoft Exchange mailbox items, Microsoft
SharePoint files, SQL Server databases and Active Directory accounts.

Veeam Explorer for Storage Snapshots allows Community Edition to utilize built-in integration with different
storage systems. Veeam gives storage vendors a framework to integrate their solutions through the Veeam
Universal Storage API. There has already been several storage vendors that have developed integrations using
this API. If you are wondering whether or not your storage vendor has developed an integration, you can find
a list of supported systems here.

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Hitchhikers Guide to Veeam Backup & Replication Community Edition

Veeam Explorer for Microsoft SQL Server

Veeam Explorer for Microsoft SQL Server, included in Community Edition, allows users to export SQL databases
from a backup file. This explorer for SQL offers the ability to view database information, export databases and
export database schema data. The SQL wizard is easy to use and offers one-click exports of a SQL database
from the state of when the last backup was taken. The exported data can then be sent to the desktop
or to a different folder. SQL is often a critical business application used in organizations, and with the Veeam
Explorer, you gain fast recovery options for FREE!

To perform a restore, simply click the restore button, choose where you want to restore from (either from
backup or replica), select Application item restore and then Microsoft SQL Server. This action will open the
database restore wizard, allowing you to select the restore point you want to restore from. Once selected and
finished with the wizard, the Explorer will open.

Figure 14: Veeam Explorer for SQL Server

Community Edition allows you to export and publish the database out of the SQL Server using the Explorer.
If you’re looking for more options to restore, Veeam Backup & Replication Enterprise and Enterprise Plus
editions have the capability to restore a database to the original server or different server, restore contents
of tables and the ability to restore a database to a specific transaction, plus some other options.

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Hitchhikers Guide to Veeam Backup & Replication Community Edition

Veeam Explorer for Microsoft Active Directory

Community Edition allows you to also protect one of the most critical applications, Microsoft Active Directory.
Veeam Explorer for Microsoft Active Directory can be used to browse and search the AD database, along with
the ability to send, export and restore single objects. If a user accidentally gets deleted, the Veeam Explorer
will make it easy to restore that user back to its location and with just a few clicks of a wizard. Additionally,
it has the power to change a user’s Active Directory password or trigger the user themselves to change it at the
next login. This could be the case of an old user account that needs to be restored and the IT administrator
doesn’t know the password, allowing the account to still be accessible, if needed.

Figure 15: Veeam Explorer for Active Directory

When it comes to the user being restored, you can specify the account state, if you want it to be enabled,
disabled or if you want to keep the account state from when the backup was performed. The Explorer can
also compare user attributes to allow you to make sure that the backup of the user has the same attributes
assigned to it that were set in the production environment.

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Hitchhikers Guide to Veeam Backup & Replication Community Edition

Figure 16: Comparing object attributes

Like our other application Explorers, this application-level restore operation opens the contents from the
backup, allowing users to browse and search for objects easily.

Veeam Explorer for Microsoft Exchange

Veeam Explorer for Microsoft Exchange provides granular recovery options for Veeam backups of Microsoft
Exchange databases. Veeam Explorer allows you to sort through files and restore necessary items, whether
they are mailboxes, folders, messages, tasks or contacts. When you are looking to restore an Exchange item,
simply choose the correct application type in the wizard and Veeam Explorer will launch, giving you a look
inside your Exchange database. With this feature, you’ll get a couple of restore options, including:

1. Export mailbox folders and items as Personal Folders (.pst)

2. Save mailbox items as Microsoft Exchange mail documents (.msg)

3. Export and save files to a desktop

4. Open an Exchange item

5. Send an Exchange item as an attachment via email

To start restoring a Microsoft Exchange object, navigate to the top of the Veeam Backup console and click
restore. In this case, you are going to want to choose the application item restore option. Choose Exchange
items and the database will load. It is important to note here that the explorer will automatically find the
exchange database, especially if it is stored in the default location. If it is not stored in this location, you
may have to point the explorer to the location of the .EDB file. When the explorer opens, you will be able
to see into the Exchange database, allowing you to export items from mailboxes, calendar settings, sent mail
and deleted items. The explorer features a search bar to help you quickly locate items to restore. This can
be useful, especially when you know the item that you are looking to recover.

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Hitchhikers Guide to Veeam Backup & Replication Community Edition

Figure 17: Veeam Explorer for Microsoft Exchange

With Community Edition, like mentioned previously, you’re able to perform the restore scenarios highlighted
in the above screenshot. If you want to send the item in an email, make sure you have configured the SMTP
server within the explorer. If you want to export it as a .pst file, you will need to have a full version of Outlook
running on the server where you are performing the restore.

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Hitchhikers Guide to Veeam Backup & Replication Community Edition

Veeam Explorer for Microsoft SharePoint

Microsoft SharePoint is a business application that allows documents to be shared collectively within teams
and with co-workers. With important documents being stored in this application, the ability to back up and
restore it is necessary. Veeam Explorer for Microsoft SharePoint allows you to browse through your SharePoint
databases directly from backups. This is done through a user-friendly interface that allows you to locate files
to restore quickly and easily.

When looking to restore from a SharePoint database, the same process is followed that has been mentioned
previously in this paper to gain access to the Explorers.

Figure 18: Veeam Explorer for Microsoft SharePoint

When accessing the Veeam Explorer, you will see many different recovery options listed at the top of the page,
including item restore via save, send document or export. The advanced find option allows you to search for
the item you need. You can also get these options by simply right clicking on the item you want to restore.

The left side of the window displays the different SharePoint databases that reside on your virtual machine
server. From there, you can look inside your folders to find the items you are looking to recover. If you choose
to save items, there is the ability for the file to be saved to a folder on the desktop, opened and edited,
or sent to whoever may need it. This Explorer provides the added functionality of being able to open the
document right in the window, enabling users to ensure it’s the correct item and to verify the document before
performing the restore. You can also send items — just make sure the SMTP server is verified in the options for
Veeam Explorer for Microsoft SharePoint.

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Hitchhikers Guide to Veeam Backup & Replication Community Edition

Veeam Explorer for Oracle

Oracle Databases are used for my corporate level applications. With their importance its necessary to be able
to have recovery options available, even when using a free backup solution. Community Edition gives you
different ways to access your backup data for disaster recovery scenarios including the ability to publish
a database, export as a RMAN backup and export database files. When you utilize publish, it allows you
to present the Oracle database directly from the backup file to the target Oracle server for test and
development use cases on fresh data.

Figure 19: Accessing Veeam Explorer for Oracle

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Hitchhikers Guide to Veeam Backup & Replication Community Edition

Direct restore to AWS, Microsoft Azure and

Azure Stack
Another restore scenario that is available in Community Edition is the ability to directly restore to AWS,
Microsoft Azure and Azure Stack, as part of Veeam Cloud Mobility. For many different reasons, the option
to utilize the public cloud in the data center has become increasingly popular. Community Edition includes
some feature functionalities that utilizes the public cloud. The ability to directly restore to AWS, Azure
or Azure Stack HUB can be used to test updates or patches, for data recovery or to migrate machines
to the cloud.

To get started, you will need to add your cloud credentials into Community Edition. In this example,
specifically, we will be using an AWS account and restoring to Amazon EC2. However, similar steps are done
if you are looking to restore to Microsoft Azure or Azure Stack HUB. To add your cloud credentials, open the
menu and select manage cloud credentials. You will need to enter your Access key and Secret key. If you
start running into issues at this step, make sure that you have set the correct permissions — refer to the user
guide if you have questions. Once added, you can then perform the restore. The wizards are a bit different,
depending on the cloud service you are restoring to (AWS, Azure of Azure Stack HUB), however, this is just
because they use different terminology. You will need to choose the region and data center region. Choose the
new VM name, if needed, and any tags you want the machine to have, and select the Instance type (VM size),
if you are bringing your own license or using one provided by Amazon.

Figure 19: Selecting Instance type

Select the Virtual Private Cloud instance, subnet and security group. You will also have the option to utilize the
secure restore feature before performing the recovery.

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Hitchhikers Guide to Veeam Backup & Replication Community Edition

Figure 20: Secure Restore

Veeam DataLabs™ Secure Restore allows you to scan the machine data with anti-virus software before
restoring the machine to Amazon EC2. During this process, Veeam will mount disks of the machine you plan
to restore to the mount server (if not designated, the mount server will be the Veeam Backup Server). Here,
it will trigger an anti-virus software to scan the files from the mounted disks. The settings for this feature are
already pre-defined to use the following anti-virus software vendors: Symantec, ESET and Windows Defender.
If malware is detected, Veeam will either abort the process or restore the machine with restrictions, depending
on the settings you set. Set your reason for restoring and then perform the operation. Leveraging the power
of secure restore is not a mandatory step. However, it’s just another great option you have available when
performing recoveries.

Going through the restore wizard, you will also be asked to use a proxy appliance. This is a recommended
setting for local VMs whose data is stored on backup repositories on premises and it is mandatory for cloud
native VMs (AWS/Azure). A proxy appliance significantly improves restore performance. The proxy appliance
is a helper cloud instance that is deployed during the restore process and removed immediately after the
restore is complete.

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Hitchhikers Guide to Veeam Backup & Replication Community Edition

More Community Editions! — Veeam ONE and Veeam

Backup for Microsoft Office 365
Since we have discussed Veeam Backup & Replication Community Edition in detail, it would only be fair
to mention that there are MORE, completely FREE, Community Editions available for other Veeam products
as well, including Veeam ONE Community Edition and Veeam Backup for Microsoft Office 365 Community
Edition. Veeam also offers free standalone editions of Veeam Agents for Microsoft Windows and Linux, so you
can utilize them for protecting physical workstations or servers.

Veeam ONE Community Edition is a great solution to help monitor and analyze your virtual environment. With
the Community Edition, you can monitor your virtual environment running on VMware vSphere or Microsoft
Hyper-V, any physical machines running the Veeam Agents and your backup infrastructure. This is similar
to Veeam Backup & Replication Community Edition, as you can monitor up to 10 Instances of any combination
of virtual and agent-based workloads. Veeam ONE can run reports on your infrastructure to proactively
manage and analyze your environment. This is a great tool for gaining a comprehensive view of what
is happening with your environment. Learn more and download Veeam ONE Community Edition.

If you’re an organization that already has migrated to Microsoft Office 365, Veeam offers an option to protect
this application. Veeam Backup for Microsoft Office 365 Community Edition is a great place to start, allowing
you to protect up to 10 users for Exchange Online and OneDrive for business, including 1 TB of SharePoint
data. Veeam Backup for Office 365 uses the same concept of the Veeam Explorers to perform recoveries of this
data. Veeam Backup for Office 365 Community Edition helps eliminate the risk of losing access and control
of your Office 365 data. It’s a great tool to start using today for Office 365.

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Hitchhikers Guide to Veeam Backup & Replication Community Edition

Get started today!

Veeam Backup & Replication Community Edition is a great, free tool to get started with backup and recovery,
especially if you currently lack a plan for your environment. With full, Standard edition functionality to protect
up to 10 workloads, any combination of VMs, cloud instances, physical servers or workstations, you can ensure
your data will be protected. If you haven’t downloaded Community Edition, get started today.

But what if your environment requires advanced features? To test the full power of Veeam, including the
advanced capabilities offered in our Enterprise and Enterprise Plus Editions, you can download a 30-Day FREE
trial of Veeam Availability Suite, which provides access to the full-featured functionality of Veeam Backup &
Replication plus the powerful monitoring and analytics of Veeam ONE. In addition to our Standard features
you can perform Backups from Storage Snapshots, use Veeam Cloud Tier to leverage Veeam’s native object
storage integration with AWS, Azure, IBM Cloud and other S3 compatible storage offerings, as well as test our
Built-in WAN Acceleration, advanced tape functionality and more! Download a FREE 30-day trial today!

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Hitchhikers Guide to Veeam Backup & Replication Community Edition

About the author

Kirsten Stoner is a Technical Analyst on the Product Strategy team at Veeam

Software. Kirsten has specialization focused on technical community
interaction in forums and events online and around the world. Kirsten
holds the Veeam Certified Engineer (VMCE) credential and specializes
in Veeam’s backup and management products. Kirsten has an additional
specialization in Veeam’s popular Community Edition, a free offering to the
IT community.

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Hitchhikers Guide to Veeam Backup & Replication Community Edition

About Veeam
Veeam® is the leader in Backup solutions that deliver Cloud Data Management™. Veeam provides a single
platform for modernizing backup, accelerating hybrid cloud, and securing data. With 400,000+ customers
worldwide, including 82% of the Fortune 500 and 69% of Global 2,000, Veeam customer-satisfaction scores
are the highest in the industry at 3.5x the average. Veeam’s 100-percent channel ecosystem includes global
partners, as well as HPE, NetApp, Cisco and Lenovo as exclusive resellers. Veeam has offices in more than
30 countries. To learn more, visit https://www.veeam.com or follow Veeam on Twitter @veeam.

© 2021 Veeam Software. Confidential information. All rights reserved. All trademarks are the property of their respective owners. 30