Advent Calendar on HomelabPro Blog

Advent Calendar Bonus Day: Merry Christmas!

Thu, 25 Dec 2025 07:00:00 +0800

Bonus Day 25: Merry Christmas! 🎄

If you’ve been following along with the Advent Calendar series, thank you.

I really appreciate every read, share, comment, and message throughout December. I hope you picked up a few useful tips along the way, and that it sparked some ideas for your own environments.

From my HomeLab to yours, I’m wishing you and your family a very Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year.

Advent Calendar Day 24: Thank You and Looking Ahead

Wed, 24 Dec 2025 07:00:00 +0800

Advent Calendar Day 24: We Made It! 🎄

Welcome to Day 24, the final day of our Veeam Blog Advent Calendar! We made it!

I can’t believe we’re already here. Twenty-four days of features, tips, technical deep dives, and hopefully a few “aha!” moments along the way. Whether you’ve been following along daily or binge-reading this all in one sitting (no judgment here!), thank you for being on this journey with me.

Advent Calendar Day 23: Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) in V13

Tue, 23 Dec 2025 07:00:00 +0800

Advent Calendar Day 23: Enhanced RBAC in Veeam v13

Welcome to Day 23 of our Veeam Blog Advent Calendar! We’re almost at the finish line. Today we’re exploring enhanced Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) in Veeam Backup & Replication v13.

V13 released a massive overhaul to how RBAC works, and honestly the team went pretty hard here and got really granular. If you’ve been using Veeam for a long time, you’ll know RBAC needed a bit of work, and boy did they deliver in V13! That’s why I’m highlighting this now because it could be so easily missed if you don’t go back and check the roles.

Advent Calendar Day 22: SureBackup Part 2 - Advanced Configuration

Mon, 22 Dec 2025 07:00:00 +0800

Advent Calendar Day 22: SureBackup Part 2 - Deep Dive Configuration

Welcome to Day 22 of our Veeam Blog Advent Calendar!

Yesterday we introduced SureBackup with the creation of our virtual labs and application groups. Today we’re going to walk through creating the SureBackup job and understanding what can be done once we have this all setup, how to use it for testing, validation, and even forensic analysis.

Advent Calendar Day 21: SureBackup Part 1 - Introduction

Sun, 21 Dec 2025 07:00:00 +0800

Advent Calendar Day 21: SureBackup Part 1 - Automated Backup Verification

Welcome to Day 21 of our Veeam Blog Advent Calendar! Today we’re starting a two-part series on one of Veeam’s most impressive features: SureBackup.

We have mentioned a few times already about features that fly under the radar but this is genuinely the biggest one that goes unnoticed, every time this gets brought up in conversation it’s like really? Veeam can do that? and the answer is YES it’s been in the product for many versions already!

Advent Calendar Day 20: Backup Job Pre and Post Scripts

Sat, 20 Dec 2025 07:00:00 +0800

Advent Calendar Day 20: Automating with Pre and Post Job Scripts

Welcome to Day 20 of our Veeam Blog Advent Calendar! Today we’re exploring a powerful automation feature: pre and post job scripts for backup jobs.

This is really a nifty little feature that genuiely gets overlooked to often and when I talk to customer who have pretty custom environment I look to this feature to help me out as it allows us to play outside the box a little bit by creating custom workflows for otherwise tricky applications.

Advent Calendar Day 19: Publishing VM Disks to Another Server

Fri, 19 Dec 2025 07:00:00 +0800

Advent Calendar Day 19: Publishing VM Disks to Another Server

Welcome to Day 19 of our Veeam Blog Advent Calendar! Today we’re diving into a powerful but often overlooked feature: publishing virtual machine disks to another server.

This is one of those features that doesn’t get the spotlight it deserves, but when you need it, it’s absolutely invaluable. Whether you’re troubleshooting, migrating data, or performing forensic analysis, the ability to attach VM disks from your backups to a different server opens up some really interesting possibilities.

Advent Calendar Day 18: Compare with Production for Active Directory

Thu, 18 Dec 2025 07:00:00 +0800

Advent Calendar Day 18: Finding What Changed in Active Directory

Welcome to Day 18 of our Veeam Blog Advent Calendar! Today we’re exploring a powerful feature for Active Directory recovery: Compare with Production.

When something goes wrong in AD, you often need to know what changed. Was a user account modified? Did group membership change? Veeam’s Compare with Production makes finding these changes simple.

Advent Calendar Day 17: Protecting Intune Policies with Veeam

Wed, 17 Dec 2025 07:00:00 +0800

Advent Calendar Day 17: Backing Up Your Intune Configuration

Welcome to Day 17 of our Veeam Blog Advent Calendar! Today we’ll be talking about Intune Policies, something that was recently added to Veeam’s toolkit and worth exploring.

Your Intune environment contains critical device management policies, compliance settings, and app configurations. Losing these means hours of manual reconfiguration. Let’s look at how Veeam protects this essential infrastructure.

Advent Calendar Day 16: VMware Tags - Dynamic Backup Automation

Tue, 16 Dec 2025 06:00:00 +0800

Advent Calendar Day 16: Let Tags Do the Work

Welcome to Day 16 of our Veeam Blog Advent Calendar! Today we’re going to take a look at how we can automate backups and create a more dynamic policy-based approach to our backups.

In most cases, the infrastructure admins and the backup admins are two different teams, and sometimes a new workload gets created and the message never reaches the backup team to add the workload to the required backups. This could mean a Tier 1 workload gets missed from regular backups or gets added to the incorrect policy and doesn’t meet your compliance needs.

Advent Calendar Day 15: Backup Move - Seamless Backup Migration

Mon, 15 Dec 2025 07:00:00 +0800

Advent Calendar Day 15: Moving Backups Without Breaking a Sweat

Welcome to Day 15 of our Veeam Blog Advent Calendar! Today we’re talking about a feature that might seem simple on the surface but is absolutely brilliant when you need it: Backup Move.

Need to migrate backups between repositories? Want to move them to faster storage, or maybe to the cloud? Backup Move does this while preserving all your deduplication and compression savings. This feature has been out for some time now but man when it came out this blew my mind and made life so much easier for hardware refreshes or customer migrations, it was definitely a quality of life upgrade we needed.

Advent Calendar Day 14: SAML Authentication - Modern Identity for VBR

Sun, 14 Dec 2025 06:00:00 +0800

Advent Calendar Day 14: SAML Authentication Arrives in V13

Welcome to Day 14 of our Veeam Blog Advent Calendar! Today we’re talking about a feature that’s been on many wish lists for years and finally arrived in Veeam Backup & Replication V13: SAML authentication.

For those of us managing enterprise environments with modern identity providers, this is a game-changer. Let’s dive into why this matters and how to set it up.

Advent Calendar Day 13: Distributed Metadata - Your Ultimate Insurance Policy

Sat, 13 Dec 2025 06:00:00 +0800

Advent Calendar Day 13: When Everything Goes Wrong, Metadata Saves the Day

Welcome to Day 13 of our Veeam Blog Advent Calendar! Today we’re diving into one of those features that really sets Veeam apart in my opinion and it’s how it handles its backup files: Distributed Metadata.

If we have ever had to rebuild a global dedupe catalog you’ll immediately know why this is insanely powerful, with Veeam we could literally lose the entire infrastructure, VBR server and all and still be able to recover as long as we have access to the repo and the encryption key, that’s the power of the distributed metadata and something that in my opinion is a great strength that is sometimes seen as a weakness and today I’ll prove why it’s such a strength.

Advent Calendar Day 12: VeeamZIP - The Unsung Hero of Quick Backups

Fri, 12 Dec 2025 07:00:00 +0800

Advent Calendar Day 12: VeeamZIP - Small Feature, Big Impact

Welcome to Day 12 of our Veeam Blog Advent Calendar! Today we’re kicking off the “fun stuff” portion of our advent journey, and I can’t think of a better feature to start with than VeeamZIP.

If you’ve never heard of VeeamZIP, you’re not alone. It’s one of those features that quietly sits in the Veeam Backup & Replication interface, not making a fuss, but absolutely saving the day when you need it. Let me tell you why this little feature deserves way more love than it gets.

Advent Calendar Day 11: Taking Stock and Looking Ahead

Thu, 11 Dec 2025 07:00:00 +0800

Advent Calendar Day 11: A Quick Recap and What’s Coming Next

Welcome to Day 11 of our Veeam Blog Advent Calendar! We’re nearly halfway through our festive countdown to Christmas, and honestly, what a journey it’s been so far! I figured today would be a perfect opportunity to take a breath, look back at what we’ve covered over the past ten days, and chat about where we’re heading for the rest of the month.

Advent Calendar Day 10: Veeam Security - After a Backup

Wed, 10 Dec 2025 07:00:00 +0800

Advent Calendar Day 10: YARA Scanning & Veeam Threat Hunter - Recovery Security

Welcome to Day 10 of our Veeam Blog Advent Calendar! Over the past two days, we’ve covered security before backup and during backup. Today, we’re tackling the “After” phase: ensuring your backups are clean and secure before you restore them back to production.

This is the final safety check. You’ve detected threats during backup, you’ve isolated infected systems, and now you need to restore operations. But how do you know the backup you’re about to restore is actually clean? What if malware slipped through? What if it’s been hiding in your backups for weeks?

Advent Calendar Day 9: Veeam Security - During a backup

Tue, 09 Dec 2025 07:00:00 +0800

Advent Calendar Day 9: Inline Malware Detection & File System Activity Analysis - During Backup Security

Welcome to Day 9 of our Veeam Blog Advent Calendar! Yesterday we explored Data Observability & Analytics, the Incident API, and the Security & Compliance Analyzer—understanding your data landscape and identifying risks before backup. Today, we’re moving to the “During” phase: protecting your data inline whilst we actually perform the backup.

Advent Calendar Day 8: Veeam Security - Before a backup

Mon, 08 Dec 2025 07:00:00 +0800

Advent Calendar Day 8: Veeam Data Observability & Analytics - Before Backup Security

Disclaimer: I’m not a professional developer, and this content is intended to demonstrate the “art of the possible” rather than serve as production-ready guidance. Use these features with caution, and test thoroughly in your environment before relying on them for critical tasks.

Welcome to Day 8 of our Veeam Blog Advent Calendar! Over the past week, we’ve been deep in the automation trenches exploring APIs, building workflows, and adding AI intelligence. Today, we’re shifting gears to focus on something equally critical: security.

Advent Calendar Day 7: Utilizing Veeam Intelligence with VeeamONE

Sun, 07 Dec 2025 07:00:00 +0800

Advent Calendar Day 7: Integrating AI Intelligence with VeeamONE

Disclaimer: I’m not a professional developer, and this content is intended to demonstrate the “art of the possible” rather than serve as production-ready guidance. Use these features with caution, and test thoroughly in your environment before relying on them for critical tasks.

Welcome to Day 7 of our Veeam Blog Advent Calendar! Over the last few days, we have spent a lot of time in automation, creating PowerShell scripts and N8N workflows and really seeing the power of automation. Today, I’d like to switch gears a little bit—still on the automation front—but rather than us writing our own code, let’s take a look at Veeam Intelligence.

Advent Calendar Day 6: Building Veeam Workflows with N8N (Part 2)

Sat, 06 Dec 2025 07:00:00 +0800

Advent Calendar Day 6: Building Veeam Workflows with N8N (Part 2)

Disclaimer: I’m not a professional developer, and this content is intended to demonstrate the “art of the possible” rather than serve as production-ready guidance. Use these features with caution, and test thoroughly in your environment before relying on them for critical tasks.

Welcome to Day 6 of our Veeam Blog Advent Calendar! Over the past few days, we’ve been on quite a journey. We explored the Veeam REST API, learned to use it with PowerShell, and yesterday we set up N8N. Today, we’re bringing it all together to create a powerful security automation workflow that could be a game-changer for your environment.

Advent Calendar Day 5: Setting Up N8N for Workflow Automation (Part 1)

Fri, 05 Dec 2025 06:00:00 +0800

Advent Calendar Day 5: Setting Up N8N for Workflow Automation (Part 1)

Disclaimer: I’m not a professional developer, and this content is intended to demonstrate the “art of the possible” rather than serve as production-ready guidance. Use these features with caution, and test thoroughly in your environment before relying on them for critical tasks.

Welcome to Day 5 of our Veeam Blog Advent Calendar! Over the past few days, we’ve been exploring the Veeam REST API through Swagger and PowerShell scripts. Today, we’re taking automation to the next level by introducing N8N (pronounced “n-eight-n”), a powerful workflow automation tool that’s about to change how you think about integrations.

Advent Calendar Day 4: Getting Hands-On with the Veeam REST API

Thu, 04 Dec 2025 07:00:00 +0800

Advent Calendar Day 4: Getting Hands-On with the Veeam REST API

Disclaimer: I’m not a professional developer, and this content is intended to demonstrate the “art of the possible” rather than serve as production-ready guidance. Use these features with caution, and test thoroughly in your environment before relying on them for critical tasks.

Welcome back to Day 4 of our Veeam Blog Advent Calendar! Yesterday we explored the Veeam REST API through Swagger and learned about what’s new in V13.0.1. Today, we’re rolling up our sleeves and getting practical, I’m going to show you how to actually use the API with PowerShell and CLI tools to accomplish real-world tasks.

Advent Calendar Day 3: Exploring the Veeam Backup & Replication REST API

Wed, 03 Dec 2025 07:00:00 +0800

Advent Calendar Day 3: Exploring the Veeam Backup & Replication REST API

Disclaimer: I’m not a professional developer, and this content is intended to demonstrate the “art of the possible” rather than serve as production-ready guidance. Use these features with caution, and test thoroughly in your environment before relying on them for critical tasks.

Welcome to Day 3 of our Veeam Blog Advent Calendar! We’re continuing our automation theme today, and I couldn’t be more excited to dive into one of my favorite topics: the Veeam Backup & Replication REST API.

Advent Calendar Day 2: Converting Kasten Helm Commands

Tue, 02 Dec 2025 07:00:00 +0800

Advent Calendar Day 2: Converting Kasten Helm Commands to Repeatable YAML

Disclaimer: I’m not a professional developer, and this content is intended to demonstrate the “art of the possible” rather than serve as production-ready guidance. Use these features with caution, and test thoroughly in your environment before relying on them for critical tasks.

Welcome back to Day 2 of our Veeam Blog Advent Calendar! Yesterday we kicked things off with an introduction to the series, and today we’re diving straight into our first topic: Automation.

Veeam Blog Advent Calendar 2025: Unwrapping 24 Days of Backup Magic

Mon, 01 Dec 2025 07:00:00 +0800

Welcome to the Veeam Blog Advent Calendar!

Hello everyone, and welcome to December! As we approach the festive season, I’m absolutely thrilled to kick off something special, a Veeam Blog Advent Calendar that will take us right through to Christmas Eve!

Think of this as your daily dose of Veeam goodness, unwrapping a new topic each day as we count down to the holidays. Whether you’re sipping hot cocoa by the fire or catching up during your lunch break, I’ll be here sharing insights, tips, and discoveries from the world of Veeam Backup & Replication.