You’ve seen all the v11 ransomware-hardening tips—but attackers keep innovating, so we can’t stop. Here’s an unconventional approach: rotate offline external drives. It’s basically a DIY air gap. Not bulletproof, but a handy “wildcard” for environments that can’t invest in tape or immutable storage yet.

Requirements & Scenario

• A hot-swap external enclosure (USB 3.0/USB-C or eSATA) for quick drive swaps.
• Multiple high-capacity SATA disks (7200 RPM).
• A rotation schedule: write backups to one drive, then eject and store it offline while another drive comes online.

Expected Outcome

• As long as the data isn’t encrypted before ejection, it’s safe once offline.
• Each drive’s backup chain is self-contained; no dependency on other drives.
• VBR writes its own metadata alongside the backups, so restores are easy when you plug the drive back in.
• Compared to tape, recovery is straightforward—just mount the drive and start restoring.

How to Use It

Watch the demo video below for the workflow.

Today’s content is refreshingly simple—nothing too technical, just a friendly reminder that’s particularly important on this special day of the year. I want to encourage everyone to make a backup, whether for personal or company data. On this annual occasion, taking a moment to back up your data feels especially meaningful.

Because today, March 31st, is World Backup Day.

Let Me Tell You About This Day

Some of you might not be familiar with this particular celebration. The origin story is quite charming—it all started from an online community. A man named Ismail Jadun came across a Reddit post where someone was expressing deep regret after losing their data. Inspired by this moment, Ismail posted his own message on Reddit, suggesting that March 31st would be perfect—the day before April Fools’ Day. His thinking was beautifully practical: backup your data the day before, so you don’t become the fool on April 1st.

Ever since the massive outbreak on May 12, 2017, ransomware has continuously evolved over the past four years, generating various variants and learning different attack methods—even learning to bribe the security guard at the gate…

But no matter what, the security guard is our most trusted ally, our final line of defense. Today I want to discuss with you how to build a secure backup data environment based on this final line of defense.

Great tools shouldn’t come with hidden strings attached. As IT administrators, we’re always hunting for utilities that make our lives easier without breaking the budget. That’s why I’m excited about Veeam’s Community Edition—a complete toolkit that’s genuinely free, not just a trial in disguise.

Beyond their flagship Veeam Availability Suite, Veeam provides every IT admin with a full set of Community Edition tools. No ads, no usage limits, no nagging upgrade prompts. They’re not quite open source, but they’re completely free to use. Think of them as Veeam’s gift to the IT community.

Introduction

On February 25, Veeam released the all-new v11 version. Last year, I published a post about upgrading to v10. Actually, this v11 upgrade process isn’t much different from the previous v10 upgrade. Today’s content will make some v11-specific adjustments to the previous post I mentioned—consider it a small update.

Before You Upgrade

Please follow the flowchart below to check your current environment and ensure all other components are properly upgraded before upgrading VBR.

Next week, Veeam is releasing the highly anticipated v11 version of their flagship VAS suite, and the crown jewel feature is Veeam CDP. I know many of you have been waiting for this functionality for quite some time—and with good reason. After nearly five years of meticulous development and refinement, Veeam is finally bringing this feature to market in v11.

What makes this CDP implementation particularly fascinating from a technical perspective is how fundamentally different it is from traditional backup and replication approaches. Since Veeam CDP leverages VMware-related technologies in ways we haven’t seen before, I wanted to give you a comprehensive primer on the underlying VMware technologies and APIs that power this feature. Understanding these foundations will help you appreciate the technical sophistication and be better prepared for deployment.