How to: Hyper-V Backup Strategy in 12 Simple Steps

The best backup strategy in the world is the one tailored to your needs. This isn’t something that can be delegated as it requires the “data owner” to answer the following questions:

12 Questions You Need Answered First

1. How much data you have?1TB? 100 GB? 10 GB. This makes a huge difference
2. How often you want to back it up?
3. How quickly you need an entire VM to come back online after a disaster?
4. How quickly you need a certain file from inside a VM?
5. How often does your data change inside the VM?
6. How much data can you afford to lose?
7. How often should backups run
8. How much backup space do you have
9. If you’re backing up to a network share / NAS, how fast is the network?
10. If backing up to an external drive, how large and how fast is it?
11. What’s running inside the VM? Exchange, SQL Server
12. Would you want for example Microsoft Exchange inside a VM backed up more frequently than the entire VM? This makes sense if you have a huge VM with lots of stale data on it and Microsoft Exchange being the most active service in the VM

Lot’s of questions but all of the above needs to be considered for a good backup strategy since no one wants surprises when disaster strikes

Tools for Implementing the Best Hyper-V Backup Strategy

BackupChain offers a range of tools for you to implement your own Hyper-V backup strategy.

Granular Hyper-V Restore can pull files / folders out of a VHD / X backup  so you can quickly recover files and folders within minutes. When your VHDX is terabytes large, you wouldn’t want to restore the whole thing just to recover a single small Word document.

Incremental and Differential Deduplication is a great tool to create and restore large virtual disks and database backups quickly and efficiently. Incremental backups are good with space usage but take a little longer to restore. Differentials aren’t as good with space usage, but you benefit from a guaranteed one or two step restore process.

Compression and Encryption spread over multiple CPU cores. BackupChain utilizes all CPU cores to speed up backups. By using parallel execution, backup time is greatly reduced. Multiple tasks may also be executed simultaneously.

Granular Hyper-V Backup is another innovative feature in BackupChain. You can back up files stored inside VMs while they are running, but from the host and without installing agents inside the VM. This is a great feature to use when you have databases inside the virtual machines that you would want backed up more often than the entire VM itself.