NAKIVO Inc., a leader in VM backup to cloud software, announced today the general availability of NAKIVO Backup & Replication v2.0 Free Edition.

The Free Edition provides a quick and simple way to make ad-hoc backups of running VMs for operational, archival, and portability purposes. VMs can be backed up locally, remotely over WAN, or to Dropbox - an easy to use, secure, and cost effective offsite cloud storage, enabling small businesses to save VMs for long term storage due to legal or regulatory requirements or in order to prevent unintentional data loss before VM decommissioning.

The Free Edition installs in literally 60 seconds, does not require reading manuals, and is so intuitive that a new user can become an expert with the product in just a few minutes. The next-gen, Web 2.0 UI enables managing all aspects of data protection at any time and from anywhere, even from a tablet. The Free Edition monitors protected infrastructure and VMs 24/7, sends email notifications on infrastructure errors and changes, and provides job grouping for easier job management.

Backups made by the Free Edition are automatically de-duplicated at the block level, which dramatically reduces storage space utilization. On top of that, the de-duplicated blocks are compressed to ensure that the least amount of space is used. This combination results in up to a 30x reduction in space required to keep backups. The backup includes all VM disks and configuration files, enabling fast and reliable VM recovery.

With the replication feature of the Free Edition users can copy and migrate VMs between hosts and storage devices, even if they are located on standalone hosts, managed by different vCenters, or not even connected to each other.

The Free Edition stays current with latest vSphere technology including vSphere 5.1 and can be installed on Windows 8 or Windows 2012 Server. Being VM OS and storage agnostic, the product can back up any VMware v4.1 VM or higher to any VMware-supported storage.

NAKIVO Backup & Replication Free Edition is available now at no cost and with no limitations on the number of hosts and VMs. Upgrading to the full version of NAKIVO Backup & Replication is as easy as replacing the license file.

"With NAKIVO Backup & Replication Free Edition, I can archive my VMs before decommissioning. The compressed and de-duplicated VM archive occupies only a trivial amount of storage space. The NAKIVO archive has already saved me several times, when we needed to recover data from decommissioned and deleted VMs." - Jim Nugid, System Administrator at SRSsoft

"The free edition NAKIVO Backup & Replication brings a ton of value with literally zero investment.  Backup is a snap, and with replication we can easily migrate VMs between locations, even if their hosts and storage devices are dissimilar and not connected to each other." - Nusret Buyukcelebi, System Architect at Mirsis Information Technologies