Azure Backup vs Veeam Agent for Microsoft Windows [EOL] comparison

Azure Backup is a scalable backup solution with zero capital investment and minimal operational expenses that can help a company achieve maximal data protection. Azure Backup’s System Center Data Protection Manager provides optional integrations that can enable you to protect both advanced workloads running in your datacenter in VMs as well as those that are on physical servers.

Azure Backup has many features that make it a most effective product. Included among these is its ability to easily scale up your storage capacity. It taps into the cloud to give you the ability to expand on a massive scale. This can be done without any monitoring or maintenance overhead.

Benefits of Azure Backup

Some of the benefits of using Azure Backup include:

• The ability to control and track the performance of your network from a single centralized location. Azure Backup has a “single pane of glass” interface that enables users to monitor, operate, govern, and analyze their backups from one place. This eliminates any need to add additional management infrastructure. You can manage different workload types, subscriptions, vaults, and regions with Azure’s Backup Center.
  
  
• A wide array of security features allows you to prevent malicious users from doing damage to the system, receive alerts if an unauthorized action takes place, and recover from any damage that results. Azure Backup has authentication requirements built in to protect vital functions, such as the ability to delete backed up data from unauthorized users. If something that impacts the backed up data takes place, users are immediately notified. Azure Backup saves any and all deleted backup data for two weeks. This enables administrators to use recovery points to recover their lost data.

Reviews from Real Users

There are a number of characteristics that make Azure Backup extremely effective. Two of these are the flexibility that it offers users and its overall effectiveness.

PeerSpot user Ayman Y., an IT manager at NOMAC, notes all of the different backup options that Azure Backup offers. He writes, “It has many features. First of all, you can schedule a backup for the client as you like. You can do a backup from the whole virtual machine as an image. You can do a backup only from files and folders. It has every option. All options are available for the backup, for the restore, for the bandwidth utilization to do backups, even virtual machines or a physical machine. If you need to do a backup of the whole image from the virtual machine, all these options are there.”

PeerSpot user Muzammil M., a senior operations engineer at the AlGosaibi Group, notes the effectiveness of Azure Backup when he writes, “Azure Backup is good because it is entirelycloud-based, which means that you can be 99.9% sure that your backup is safe. This is the reason that I suggest its use for companies that need to back up critical data.”

What is Veeam Agent for Microsoft Windows?

Veeam Agent for Microsoft Windows is a robust, trusted data protection and recovery solution for both physical and virtual machines. This solution can be used to safeguard all kinds of machines and devices, such as desktops, laptops, and mobile devices. Veeam Agent for Windows can easily be installed on all Windows-based physical servers, workstations, desktops, and virtual machines, and works well in either a standalone or managed mode.

It is widely understood that all users should back up all stored data on a regularly scheduled basis to protect all important data. In the event of a data disaster, data can easily be restored from the backup using this solution and one would never have to experience a loss of important information. Users can implement Veeam Agent for Microsoft Windows to perform regularly scheduled backups automatically, or manually, as needed. Users can choose to back up individual folders and files, designate particular computer files, or even the entire computer image. 

Backups can be saved in several different locations, such as:

• Cloud Repository (Veeam Cloud Connect)
• Backup Repository (Veeam Backup Server)
• Network Shared Folder 
• Local Computer Drive
• Removable Storage Device (USB, CD, DVD, etc)
• Microsoft OneDrive

Veeam Agent for Windows users are able to:

• Create a Veeam Recovery Media file on an external hard drive, CD/DVD/BD, internal hard drive, or choose to establish an ISO file using Veeam Recovery Media on disk.

• Create a comprehensive system image backup and securely back up chosen computer volumes or specific personal folders with files. Users have the option to store backups in a network shared folder on an external hard drive, or use the Veeam backup repository, Veeam Cloud Connect Repository, or Microsoft OneDrive.

Veeam Data restore offers two options:

• Volume-level restore: Veeam Agent is able to restore the complete content of the entire volume. The solution retrieves the data blocks pertaining to the designated volumes and copies them to the desired location. A volume can then be restored to a new location or its original location.
  
  
• File-Level Restore: Veeam Agent will use Veeam’s proprietary driver to publish backup content safely to a user's computer file system. Users can then access the content user Veeam’s Virtual Disk Driver (VDK), which is included with the solution. Users can then easily browse and copy the desired files and folders to use as desired.

Veeam Recovery Media

Veeam Agent for Windows allows users to create a complete recovery image of their computer using Veeam Recovery Media. This image contains all data necessary to run Microsoft Windows Recovery Environment (Windows RE) while supplying a viable option to run users’ computer systems.

Reviews From Real Users:

“We use Veeam Agent for security as well as to ensure we have a backup should the server or discs fatally die. We are a small company with just one building, we want to be sure that should a server be gone we have a backup in the cloud so that we can survive.” - Director at a tech services company 

“The compatibility of Veeam Agent for Microsoft Windows with other solutions is good. Its integration with other solutions is also good. I also find the product user-friendly.” - Business Development Manager at a tech services company.