How to Backup a Hyper-V VM Remotely Online

Backing up a Hyper-V VM to an FTP site is simple; however, if you’re not using the right tools and settings, it can become quite inefficient and even lead to data loss.

FTP sites are a blessing and a curse. FTP is probably one of the worst standards in computing. No two FTP server software packages are alike and each has its own interpretation of the “FTP standard”. Hence, you’ll find lots of incompatibilities out there, especially on Linux based FTP server systems.

In addition, FTP is a layer above the file system.  Linux has its own file systems and they are all quite limited when compared to NTFS in Windows. You can quickly end up with lots of transmission errors which are actually not caused by FTP (even though they may be reported by the FTP software) but instead originate from file system limitations. Typical limitations in Linux are:

• lack of supporting long path names
• invalid characters are different on Windows than on Linux
• Max file size limitations may be different
• Path component length limits are different
• Unicode support or lack thereof
• UTF-8 Support and lack thereof
• and the list could go on forever…

Regular FTP Backup Software is usually not capable of backing up VMs efficiently, because:

• It uploads the same file over and over every time it changes. This is a killer when you are dealing with large VM files
• It passes file names as-is to the FTP server
• It doesn’t offer compression
• It doesn’t offer deduplication and incremental backup

Now for a simple Hyper-V FTP backup of a virtual machine install BackupChain on both sides, the VM host as well as the receiving server. BackupChain offers its own FTP server and this will greatly simplify the backup setup for you.

Using BackupChain you get:

• Multi-Core, parallelized backup compression and incremental and differential deduplication
• compatibility with most FTP sites
• A built-in FTP server, Unicode capable, if you choose to host the FTP site yourself and save yourself many headaches
• Fully automatic Hyper-V back up and restore, even when using FTP backup targets
• VHD / VHDX files are uploaded once compressed (full compressed backup first), then incremental or differential deltas (compressed) thereafter
• All that works on all standard compliant FTP servers, such as FTP in IIS7 and later, and BackupChain’s own FTP server