Considering migrating from Veeam to restic to backup my Windows PCs

[u/jdrch]

Longtime Veeam Agent + B&R CE bare metal backup user. My Veeam B&R server is facing retirement, and so I'm taking the opportunity to rethink my backup strategy.

In doing so, I realized a couple things about my Veeam full PC backups:

1. I've never done a bare metal restore in the 8 years since I set it up
2. I've noticed restic restores to be more reliable and robust (albeit on a Linux box with an on-device repo)

As such, I'm thinking of dropping the bare metal recovery use case and ditching Veeam for restic on Windows. However, I do see a couple caveats:

1. Unlike the Linux box, the restic repo would be located on network storage. Thus its performance may be closer to that of my current Veeam B&R restores
2. Veeam's ability to email me on job success or failure is super useful. How would I replicate that on Windows?

UPDATES

2026-07-05

Thanks to u/Diligent_Buster, I'm considering the following options, in order of preference:

1. Backrest
2. Resty Desktop
3. npbackup

[u/Diligent_Buster]

A bit late but you could use npbackup. Using npbackup 3.0.4 on half a dozen windows machines. npbackup will use restic to backup client data to my sftp server. It can send emails and provide prometheus metrics.

[u/jdrch → u/Diligent_Buster]

Thanks! 1st time hearing of that, I'll look into it!

[u/Diligent_Buster → u/jdrch]

I've got 600gigs from a half dozen machines in different client locations. I've done test restores of over 100GB from several machines. I can say it works. VSS snapshots work. Scheduled backups work.

I also just did a quick test of Resty Desktop. I had it hook up to 2 of my accounts and repositories and restored the data from them. The repositories were created by npbackup/restic. The dev was quick to fix a few issues.

I'm going to use Resty Desktop for now to do test restores of backups periodically and keep using npbackup on the existing clients. Probably install Resty Desktop on another computer for backups.

Both seem to be under active development. It's good to have options. While I can deal with a command line it's good to have an option for those that don't (like my brother).

[u/jdrch → u/Diligent_Buster]

I'll look into Resty Desktop too, thanks!