URBackup - I'm impressed

[wseaton]

Getting really sick of Veeam Endpoint Free, but also needed something that was free and had central mgmt for small businesses, non profits, etc. Had read reviews on URbackup, was curious, but didn't take it seriously.

 

Guess I should have. This is a pretty good kit for free.

 

Quite simply you install URbackup server, in my case I threw it on a win10 box I'm using as a spare utility server and pointed its store at a 3TB extra drive I had. Im assuming you could point its data store at a share or any connected storage.

 

The slick part is the client. Once you have your server preferences set for how you want to do backups, frequency etc, the Client just goes. Install the client on a PC, it looks for the server automatically, adds itself to the list, and takes off. Its also fast....way faster than Veeam. Im guessing it does compression on the fly. Yeah...its blazing fast. Did I say it was fast? 

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I confirmed that restores work, but with some caveats. It uses a Linux boot environment, and this presents the usual bits of weirdness not present with Windows based Macrium boot environments..Some storage controllers or boot environments cause the Linux shell to just fail, and not being a strong Linux guy I didn't try to troubleshoot those. 

 

But, what does work is combining a specific backup set so it could be mounted as VHD. Check.

 

The boot recovery also runs perfectly inside of VirtualBox. I could quickly restore backup bare metal images into VirtualBox and spin them up immediately after a restore as a VM. Check.

 

Client also ran on Server 2019 running some SQL instances. Macrium and most Freemium utilities want a hefty license fee for that. Spun those puppies up no sweat as restored VMs easy peezy.

 

Didn't try the straight file level backups. My need is pure DR and knowing I have a reliable and central solution for full image backups on a hodge podge of Windows machines. It does that very, very well.