others VS chocolatey.veeam-agent

Also see Restic's list of Linux backup software. https://github.com/restic/others

There is also https://github.com/restic/others which has some keywords (e.g. is it encrypted, does it do compression) for most FOSS backup solutions. It can be outdated or incomplete for some entries, though.

https://github.com/restic/others is a nice collection of free software links too - you can click through those and see if any are Windows supporting. But I'd personally just go with restic.

Backblaze is an awful piece of software when you look at it from “a backup software” point of view. It’s made pretty, simple, native (or is it Electron now?) - yes. But then it stops there. On top of that if you read there ifs, buts, and gotchas you’d want to stay far away from them.

They’ve downright absurd data deletion/retention and versioning rules.

Besides I do not trust any service that promises to give anything “unlimited” for a fixed cost.

As I usually mention in comments on this topic - I’d strongly urge people to use and support backup tools like borgbackup.org (Vorta is an excellent Borg GUI), restic.net (a GUI is glaringly missing), kopia.io (up and coming; promising; comes with a GUI), for smaller datasets there’s very good but more expansive Tarsnap (not FOSS).

And then there are others - https://github.com/restic/others#list-of-backup-software

My understanding is that full system backups on Windows requires the tool to create VSS snapshots and back up from the snapshot. Any tool that just copies files on the disk won't work.

I use Veeam Agent for this purpose (free, but not open source). It can do full system backups and supports both restoring to the same hardware and new hardware. Restores are done via a bootable WinPE-based image that the tool creates.

One cool thing about it I haven't seen in other backup software is that incremental backups work via a driver that tracks which disk blocks are changed as the system is running. It avoids the need to rescan the disk to detect what has been changed (though it will still do that if the filesystem is modified outside of Windows, eg. if dual booting).

The biggest downside is Veeam's website. It's pretty "enterprisey" and they want you to register to be able to download. I install via the Chocolatey package manager to avoid this. Chocolatey's package source has a direct link to the official installer [0].

There are no ads, nagging, nor upselling in the software itself. I have not seen it making any network connections outside of connecting to my backup target host and the auto-updates server.

I've been looking for open source alternative with a similar feature set, but haven't had too much luck. There's Bacula, but that seems to very much be designed for an enterprise use case.

[0] https://github.com/sbaerlocher/chocolatey.veeam-agent/blob/m...