Veeam doesn’t have any objections to creating a community of free users in exchange for a lengthy list of paying customers. Today the backup software rolled out new features to the commercial edition of its solution, and at the same time introduced the Veeam Backup Free Edition. The latter is the successor of the free Veeam FastSCPTM tool, which has been around for quite some time and has become quite popular.

The main addition to the paid Veeam Backup & Replication 6.1 solution is something that’s also included in the free version: something called Veeam ZIP, a compression mechanism that automatically dedupes a VM as well as the user data it stores and squeezes it all into a considerably lighter .VBK archive file. This aims to speed up backup and recovery, of course.

Another thing that 6.1 includes is support for the newest release of the System Center Virtual Machine Manager, in addition to enhancements to the UI based on feedback users provided.

In turn, the Free Edition comes with a few major improvements of its own. That covers improved VMware migration, a file manager and a recovery menu that lets the admin restore individual files from backup.

“Veeam FastSCP has been hugely popular since we introduced it in 2006. More than 150,000 Virtualization Lovers use it, and with these new capabilities, Veeam Backup Free Edition offers even more value. We are excited to offer this latest gift to the virtualization community, said “Ratmir Timashev, Veeam’s president and chief exec.

Just a couple of months ago the company decided to release some figures reflecting its growth and its platform’s popularity. According to that official data some 5,000 new customers signed up last quarter, and sales rose by 103 percent.