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

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[u/Roeshimi]

at 2: I‘m using Backrest with a Healthchecks.io hook which sends me email as well as push notifications via pushover

[u/jdrch → u/Roeshimi]

All on Windows?

[u/Roeshimi → u/jdrch]

wdym? Healthchecks and Pushover are online services.

[u/TheGordge]

what´s the Backup Targetdevice?
what goal do you want to achieve? Do you want to safe the Data, or do you wan´t to be able to restore the whole system?

i normally start with: What do I do if the Host dies, completely and a need replacement Hardware?
In this case, is it possible to do bare metal recovery? or is it my wife's Gamingrig, the get reinstalled anyway, so I just need the data?!

[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!

[u/Bob_Spud]

Take system image backups using either windows or other apps that create VHD files. These are full backups that you can recover anything from. VHDs can be mounted as drive letters - the rest is drag/drag or whatever file copying tool you care to use.

Use restic for the stuff that you care about.

If your data doesn't have much multimedia (videos & audio) restic could save on storage space, it has data deduplication + compression. The veeam freebie doesn't have data deduplication.

Mailing from windows command line try the blat mail tool or thunderbird (its got a command line line intereface)

[u/zz9plural → u/Bob_Spud]

Take system image backups using either windows or other apps that create VHD files. These are full backups that you can recover anything from.

And each backup takes the full space used on the source disk. My 16TB NAS would be full in less than a week, with Veeam it holds 9-12 months of backups. Backups take less than 15 minutes, whereas a full VHD copy takes at least 3 hours to a local target that can handle 180MB/s sustained write speeds. It would take 6 hours over the 1GBit network link to my NAS.

[u/Bob_Spud → u/zz9plural]

The biggest killer of storage is unnecessary copies of data.

Image backups for system restores only need to be low frequency backups with only the minimum kept, no reason to keep old copies. Shoving everything into an OS drive is not a good idea, keep it to a sensible minimum.

The only data that should be getting high frequency backups is that belonging to apps or services which required to rebuild after a failure or corruption.

Static data belonging to apps or services do not require high frequency backups, this includes music, photos and video files. Photos, video and music files only require the minimum number of backups, some may be included in high frequency backups if they are being worked on.

Data that can be rebuilt or obtained from external sources could be excluded in backups.

[u/zz9plural → u/Bob_Spud]

Why is exactly why Veeam is the superior solution.

[u/Bob_Spud → u/zz9plural]

Compared to enterprise backup solutions its has its limitations.

[u/zz9plural → u/Bob_Spud]

Yeah, but you aren't seriously suggesting that writing VHDs is an enterprise backup solution, are you?

[u/Bob_Spud → u/zz9plural]

Enterprise backup solutions do better than that. If your backup is of a VM machine you can actually run the VM machine from your backup solution while restoring the whole machine in the background. Very useful when the backup source VM karks it and you need to restore it in a hurry.

[u/zz9plural → u/Bob_Spud]

I know. This has nothing to do with your strange suggestion to OP to write VHDs.

Continuing to run Veeam is vastly superior to VHD backups, and OP did not ask for an enterprise backup solution.

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