Zmanda Pro for Windows

Backs up Windows laptops, desktops, servers, databases, VMs and file shares

Zmanda Pro for Windows is the client application for Zmanda Pro, an enterprise backup, recovery, and data resilience platform, a BETSOL company. It installs on Windows desktops, laptops and servers and connects to a Zmanda Pro server that your organization runs, either as a managed cloud service hosted by Zmanda or self-hosted on your own infrastructure. It is not a standalone backup tool: a Zmanda Pro account and an accessible server are required before the client can run a backup.

WHAT IT PROTECTS

Once the device is registered to a backup user, the client protects files and folders, and Windows Server System State on servers with the Server Backup Role enabled. Full disk image backup, which enables bare-metal recovery, is available as a paid add-on. It also backs up VSS-aware applications through the Volume Shadow Copy Service, including Microsoft SQL Server and Exchange Server. With the SQL Server VSS Writer you can select individual databases rather than the whole instance. Exchange Server backup is available when the client runs on Windows Server editions with the appropriate VSS writer installed.

The same client protects Hyper-V virtual machines, including existing VM snapshots, and Windows network shares over SMB/CIFS. For shares, Zmanda recommends installing the client directly on the device hosting them.

HOW BACKUPS WORK

All processing happens on the device before data leaves it. The client splits data into variable-sized blocks, deduplicates against what the destination already holds, compresses, and encrypts with AES-256. After the first full backup, only changed blocks are transmitted, so later jobs stay small and no periodic full backups are needed.

Backups are written to the destination your administrator configures: Amazon S3, Microsoft Azure Blob Storage, Google Cloud Storage, Wasabi, any S3-compatible object storage, an SFTP server, a NAS, or a local disk. Because encryption is applied on the client under a zero-knowledge key model, Zmanda cannot decrypt the contents of your backups. Where the storage target supports it, retention can be made immutable using S3 Object Lock, Google Cloud Storage Object Lock, or ZFS snapshots.

RECOVERY

You can restore individual files and folders, recover to any previous backup point, or restore a complete disk image. Disk Image backups can also be restored directly as VMware-compatible virtual disks in .vmdk format, so a physical machine can return as a virtual one without a separate conversion step.

For a machine that will not boot, the desktop application includes a USB Recovery Media wizard. It can produce minimal recovery media based on the Windows Recovery Environment, a bootable WinRE ISO, or a full Windows To Go environment on a USB drive. You boot from that media, sign in with your Zmanda Pro credentials, and restore the system to the attached drives, including bare-metal restores. Restoring Windows to dissimilar hardware may require driver installation or running sysprep beforehand, and can affect software activation tied to hardware identifiers.

DEPLOYMENT AND ADMINISTRATION

The client installs interactively from an MSI package, or silently at scale using the supplied PowerShell installation script, which also handles certificate configuration and uninstallation. It can be removed manually through Control Panel.

Administrators define backup policies centrally and apply them across many devices, so a fleet of laptops can share one set of protected items, schedules and retention rules. The interface can be hidden from end users where backups should run without their involvement, and pre-backup or post-backup commands can be run on the device.

REQUIREMENTS AND NOTES

VSS filesystem snapshots work on NTFS and ReFS volumes only. FAT and exFAT do not support snapshots, and the snapshot option should be disabled for them. Windows Server System State backup requires supported Windows Server versions with the Server Backup Role enabled; where it causes problems, Disk Image backup is the recommended alternative.

Zmanda Pro is licensed per protected machine rather than by data volume.