Hands On – Veeam for DOS


Veeam has a bit of a history with releasing products or enhancements that once seemed unlikely. Two recent examples that come to mind are support for tape and support for physical machines (both Windows and Linux machines). Now, without much fanfare, Veeam has conjured up another surprise announcement with their new addition – Veeam For DOS.

As odd as it sounds, this is actually a sector of the market that is often overlooked. There are many business out there that have old code running on even older machines. In the event of an accident, this could spell instant disaster. Given that Veeam is all about data availability, Veeam stepped up to the challenge to product DOS-based workloads.

I had a chance to try it out in my environment. I was glad to see that it ships on 3.5″ floppies, after all, who still has 5.25″ drives around? The install process was pretty easy (launch install.bat to kick off the guided install), just be sure that you meet the minimum requirement for space (2 MB required for the program, plus additional space for any local backups).

All in all the program works as advertised. You can only perform one type of a job at a time however. If you need to perform something like a replication job followed by backup job, you will need to quit the program and restart it. I believe this is due 640kb memory barrier inherent in DOS.

The replication feature is pretty basic, but it does support a handful of protocols, including IPX/SPX and the Trumpet TCP/IP implementation. It also apparently supports null modem transfers, but I could not test it as I didn’t have a null modem lying around.

All in all, I am pretty happy to see a vendor finally consider an oft-forgotten market segment. Next up I am toying around adding an entry into my autoexex.bat to automatically kick off a backup job on startup. We’ll see how that goes.

Please note that this was originally posted on April 1st, 2016 … Happy April Fools.