VM backup is not simply copying the VM folder. To create an advanced plan, you need to use VM backup strategies to backup VM like a pro.
Updated by Nick Zhao on 2023/03/02
VMs are often used by companies to deploy business systems now and every company should know the importance of data backup to guarantee business contiunuity.
VM backup is not as simple as file backup and there are some strategies for that.
When you backup a folder on PC, you can simply export it to external drive but it might not be wise to export VM for data backup every time because the folder of VM often contains several GB of data. If you would like to have several recovery points of one VM, it will eat much storage of datastore. In addition, it will take a long time to backup a large VM and this might influence the production network.
Therefore, VM backup strategies are needed to optimize the backup solution and they can help you backup VM with an integrated plan including when to backup VM, how to backup VM, where to store the VM backup, etc.
There are many backup strategies for VM backup and in this section, there will be a best practice for VMware ESXi VM backup to show you how backup strategies help backup VM.
The backup software used in this section is Vinchin Backup & Recovery, a professional backup and disaster recovery solution for VMware vSphere and also Hyper-V, XenServer, XCP-ng, RHV/oVirt, OLVM, OpenStack, etc.
When you select the VMs to backup, you can have the first backup strategy, backing up a single VM or a batch of VMs. If you would like to backup multiple VMs in one job, just tick as many VMs as you wish. If there are multiple virtual disks on one VM, you can click the plus button to untick the undesirable virtual disks.
When you configure the backup storage, you choose to save the VM backup in a local partition, logical volume, iSCSI storage, NFS storage, etc.
In the third step, there are more strategies to choose. Schedule, which means automatic backup, lets you select when to backup VM, daily, weekly, or monthly. Full Backup means backing up the whole folder of the VM and it is usually used together with Incremental Backup and Differential Backup which backup only the changed data every time to save backup storage and time.
To avoid VM backup jobs taking too much bandwidth of the production network, you can directly limit the max speed of the backup jobs to reduce the impact in Speed Controller.
How to save the VM backup is one of the most-concerned strategies that IT administrators care about. In Data Storage Policy, you can enable Data Deduplication and Data Compression to merge the duplicate data and compress the data before storing it in datastore, saving much storage space. Companies might be afraid of losing sensitive data. Enabling Data Encryption will encrypt the backup data with ASE 256 encryption technology. This bank-level encryption technology will prevent data from being cracked by attackers.
If you would like to delete the outdated backups, you can configure a Retention Policy. For example, you can set up storing the latest 30 VM backups or the backups in the last 30 days. If would like to set up an advanced retention policy, you can try GFS Retention Policy here.
In Advanced Strategies, you can set up how to take snapshot when backing up VM. Multithread will let you control the number of the threads for a single job. BitDetector is another data compression strategies in Vinchin Backup & Recovery which will exclude swap files, partition gap and unpartitioned space to save more storage space.
In Transmission Strategy, you can select the common LAN backup, using the production network, or LAN-free backup, using the storage area network to transfer VM backup data. For VMware vSphere, HOTADD is supported for data transmission. To further protect data from being eavesdropped by attackers, you can select Encrypted Transmission to transfer data with SSL encryption technology.
In Individual Strategies, you can enable CBT, changed block tracking, to speed up incremental backup.
With these backup strategies, you can make an advanced backup plan for VMware VM and that will help you build a highly efficient VM backup system.
Except for these VM backup strategies, Vinchin Backup & Recovery can also let you decrease RTO with Instant Recovery which lets you recover a failed VM from its backup in 15 seconds if you have deployed multiple hypervisors, you can also use Vinchin Backup & Recovery to move VM VM between different hypervisors with VM backup (Hyper-V is not supported for now).
Vinchin Backup & Recovery has been selected by thousands of companies and you can also start to use this powerful system with a 60-day full-featured free trial. Just click the button to get the installation package.
Simply copying the folder of VM to make data backup will bring many problems later so to make a highly efficient backup system, you need to configure backup strategies when creating backup jobs.
There are a lot of VM backup strategies in Vinchin Backup & Recovery like schedule, incremental backup, data compression, data encryption, etc. to help you save a lot of work for backing VM. Don’t miss the free trial.
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