Spent an hour trying to get Veeam to work and it can't connect to an agent installed on the same machine. Sigh. Thanks for the suggestion though.

You don't need anything besides the agent if you're just using it for a single computer. The agent can back up to a drive or network location without being connected to the backup repository.

You added too many steps.

For personal use of backing up othe local computer you ONLY need Veeam Agent for Windows Free. You install it and then configure your backup.

The step where you took a wrong turn was probably to also install Veeam Backup and Replication? That's basically the orchestrator, but you only need this in an enterprise environment where you have multiple servers to backup. In that scenario you can use the same Agent to backup standalone Windows Servers or Computers.

But in your case that is not needed. You install the Agenda and use just that to backup to (ideally a ReFS) disk or SMB share. I can only suggest to retry it. With ReFS and the forever incremental backups are very, very fast.

Clonezilla is another alternative. I haven’t used it in years, but it used to be pretty good.