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What is Veeam Backup & Replication?

Veeam Backup & Replication (VBR) is Veeam Software's application for backing up, replicating and restoring virtual machines, physical servers, cloud workloads and applications. It is the backup engine inside Veeam's wider product bundle.

Confidence and results often differ. In Veeam's Data Trust and Resilience Report 2026, 90% of organizations said they were confident they could recover from a cyber incident, yet only 28% of ransomware victims fully recovered their data.

Dispatch office, vans and warehouses

A VBR setup looks a lot like a delivery company.

  • Backup server: the dispatch office. It runs every job and schedule and stores the settings.
  • Proxies: the vans. They read data from the source, compress it and carry it on.
  • Repositories: the warehouses where backup files land. These can be Windows or Linux servers, network shares or S3 buckets, the setup covered under Veeam backup to object storage.

Small sites run all three on one server. Larger ones spread proxies across hosts. VBR is licensed on its own or as part of Veeam Data Platform.

Backups and standby replicas

VBR makes two kinds of copy. A backup is stored in Veeam's own format and has to be restored or mounted before use. A replica is a ready-to-run copy of a virtual machine, kept switched off on a standby host.

With a replica, failover is little more than switching it on. Replicas cost standby hardware, though, so most teams keep them for a handful of critical systems. Replication with a recovery point measured in seconds is a separate feature, explained under continuous data protection.

Keeping the backup server out of reach

VBR stores the passwords it needs for vCenter (VMware's management console), hosts and every repository. Whoever controls the backup server can delete restore points, and it looks like routine housekeeping.

  • Server joined to the production domain. The same admin accounts as everywhere else make credential theft anywhere a route to the backups.
  • Retention set only in the job. Anyone who reaches the console can shorten it.
  • Configuration backup kept on the server itself. It vanishes with the server, and recovery becomes a manual rebuild.
  • Repositories that do not enforce a lock. A Veeam hardened repository or object storage with S3 Object Lock closes that gap, as covered under Veeam immutable backup.

ARTESCA and Veeam Backup & Replication

ARTESCA buckets serve as VBR object storage repositories, alone or inside a scale-out backup repository, a group Veeam manages as one. Scality's Veeam compatibility page lists S3 Object Lock and Veeam's Smart Object Storage API (SOSAPI) as validated. ARTESCA keeps its own accounts, apart from any Windows domain the VBR server joins.

The ARTESCA+ Veeam appliance runs VBR on the same hardware as the storage. ARTESCA does not protect the VBR server itself. An encrypted server still loses its configuration and stored passwords, and recovery starts with a reinstall.