Data Recovery Digest

Last year, backup and recovery company Veeam held their first user conference in Las Vegas, mimicking the customer-focussed events popularized by Apple over the course of the last decade. The intent of such a conference is to make tech seem accessible, and that's a direction that's mirrored in the company's release of EndPoint Backup Free.

The program isn't particularly revolutionary, in of itself — it creates a backup of your Windows system to an external hard drive, a network-attached storage device or one of Veeam's proprietary products. What sets it apart from the many competitors looking to offer a similar service, however, is the ease of use that it offers.

This isn't backup software that requires lots of tinkering on the part of the user. Instead, it streamlines the process to make it as easy as possible for you to get it up and running. You might think that this strategy is an attempt to target the novice consumer, but it's actually quite the opposite. Veeam have made it quite clear that the free version of EndPoint Backup is specifically intended to get IT professionals on board with the product.

Speaking to tech news outlet RCN, Veeam's vice president of product strategy Doug Hazelman stated "we want to get [EndPoint Backup Free] in the hands of IT pros [and] see how we can expand it in the future." It certainly seems that the company has designs to take a larger chunk of the data industry by offering a highly capable product for free, and the intention is to start this process by targeting the most experience and knowledgeable consumers in the marketplace.

The key is how scalable and flexible EndPoint Backup Free is. If you're looking to perform a simple backup, you'll scarcely need to offer any more information than what you want to be archived and what sort of device you want to use to do so. Alternatively, you can specify every last detail of the backup, dipping into advanced options that can shape the process to your individual needs.

After a successful beta test that ran through November 2014, EndPoint Backup Free is now available for anyone to download without charge. This will be a compelling opportunity for anyone who has used backup software in the past and been dissatisfied with it, or even users who have held off establishing a backup for their computer up until this point. The plan seems to be for Veeam to offer this program up for free, in the hope that anyone that tries it will be happy enough to investigate the other products that the company offers.

It will certainly be interesting to see whether that gambit pays off, as the already competitive data recovery industry looks set to become even more ruthless — as we become more dependent on computers in all aspects of our lives, the need for reliable backup software is only going to grow. Veeam is letting customers make their own conclusions as to whether the company's products are worthy of a slice of the marketplace.