Veeam Free Backup Limitations

Here’s a list of limitations of Veeam’s Free Backup. Of course it’s hard to maintain a list of limitations of Veeam Backup Free Edition, because a list of limitations is a list of things Veeam Backup can’t do – but compared to what?

So I’ve decided to make two lists of limitations. The first list is the most painful limitations that you might expect backup software to do as part of it’s basic functionality. The second list is a list of limitations of the Free backup software compared to the paid version as of 25/11/2015 (because updates to the paid versions will increase this list of limitations to the free version).

Veeam Backup Free Edition’s most obvious limitations are that:

• It doesn’t do incremental or differential backups. This is quite significant because you won’t be able to store as many backups
• It doesn’t allow you to backup more than 1 VM at a time. This will impact the backup window
• You can’t schedule backups (although there is a script you can run to do this and I hear a new version might actually allow this functionality now)

Here’s a list of limitations of the free version compared to the paid version:

• No Synthetic backups – increased full backup duration and impact on VM resources
• No Veeam SureBackup
• No backup from storage snapshots
• Veeam Explorer for Exchange & SharePoint is limited
• Instant File-Level recovery is limited
• No Instant VM Recovery
• No 1-Click Restore
• No U-AIR recovery
• No replication
• Limitations on tape support
• No WAN Acceleration
• No backup copy jobs
• No Centralized management
• No vSphere Web Client plug-in
• No Self-service recovery
• Limited task automation
• Limitations to VSS
• No Near-CDP
• No vPower
• No Web UI
• No On-Demand Sandbox
• No VM Copy
• No Advanced monitoring
• No Reporting
• No Capacity Planning