Virtual Machine Backup: 6 Best Tips

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Virtual Machine Backup:

6 Best Tips

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 Virtual Machine Backup: 6 Best Tips

Virtual machines are hosted in the cloud or on high-end on-premises servers. These hosting environments have
lower failure rates than other types of systems. Thus, some believe that VM backup is not necessary.

But the fact is that no matter how reliable the server that hosts your VMs is, the VMs can still fail. Natural
disasters, human errors, malware, and other threats could all erase virtual machines or make them unavailable.

That’s why VM backup should be part and parcel of your data protection strategy. Below, we provide some VM
backup best practices.

1. Don’t Use VM Snapshots as Backups

VM snapshots are a useful tool for saving a VM at a particular point in time and rolling back to it later. But they
are not a backup feature.

Snapshots don’t create full copies of a VM or the data stored inside it. Nor do they provide you with an isolated
instance of your VM that you can use to restore the VM later if the production environment is lost.

By all means, use snapshots if they are useful to you (which they can be in order to safeguard against issues
that might arise when patching, applying updates and so on). But don’t assume that just because you perform
snapshots regularly, you don’t need to perform true VM backup.

A true VM backup is a consistent copy of the VM that is stored independently of the production environment
(ideally, in an off-premises environment) and that can be used to rebuild the VM from scratch at any point
in time.

2. Use Changed Block Tracking for VMware VM

Changed Block Tracking (CBT) is an incremental backup technology for virtual machines that are managed using
VMware. CBT improves the speed, performance, and efficiency of virtual machine backups.

Unless you use raw device mapping for your virtual machines (in which case CBT is not supported), or a legacy
virtual machine version that doesn’t support CBT, you should definitely take advantage of this feature for
VMware environments. MSP360 Backup for VMware supports CBT.

Further reading How to Restore a Hyper-V Machine with MSP360 Managed Backup

3. Follow Standard Backup Best Practices

It should go without saying that you should adhere to standard backup best practices when working with VM
backups. But, as noted above, because VM production environments tend to be more reliable than other types
of infrastructure, it can be easy to assume that you don’t need to take standard backup rules as seriously when
working with VMs.

But you do. In particular, be sure that you implement these rules to your VM backup best practices:

1. Back up VMs to a secondary location by following the 3-2-1 backup rule.

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2. Keep backups encrypted to provide another line of defense against security breaches.

4. File-level Backup for VMs

In some cases, you may not need an entire VM backed up, but instead need to back up just specific files or
virtual disks. Backing up data this way can be faster and more efficient in cases where the files that need to
be backed up represent only a small portion of the total VM data. If you are in this situation, you can easily
configure file-level and disk-level backup for VMs using MSP360 Backup (which also lets you exclude any specific
files, disks, or directories).

5. Application-Aware Backup in a Virtual Environment

If your customers’ virtual machines host Exchange or SQL Server, you should use application-aware backup for a
consistent backup of databases. Use the proper edition of MSP360 Backup (Exchange or SQL Server) to separate
and manage database files.

Further reading MS Exchange Backup in a Virtual Environment Using MSP360 Backup

6. Test VM Restores
A final VM backup best practice is to ensure that you test VM restores on a regular basis. We recommend
keeping a test server on hand for this purpose. Use the server to run through your restore routine in order to
determine whether any problems arise in restoring data from your VM backup files (whether they are complete
images, or individual files or disks).

Bonus: Best Techniques for Virtual Machine Data Recovery

When it comes time to restore a VM backup, there are two main approaches:

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1. Full restore from image-based backup: You can turn off the VM and restart it based on your image backup.
This is often the simplest and fastest restore method. For more information, see this article on how to perform a
full VM restore in MSP360 Backup.

2. Granular recovery: In some cases, you may wish to restore only certain files, instead of the full VM. Refer to
our article on file-level restore for VMware to learn how easily this can be done with MSP360 Backup. If you are
working with Hyper-V VMs, see this article on file-level restore for Hyper-V.

Conclusion
No matter how reliable your production VM environments are, don’t make the mistake of assuming they are
failure-proof. Follow the VM backup best practices described above to ensure that your VM backups are ready
when failures occur.

About MSP360
Established in 2011 by a group of IT professionals, MSP360™ (formerly CloudBerry Lab) provides cutting-edge
SaaS solutions that are simple, cloud-based, and profitable for Managed Service Providers.

MSP360™ Managed Backup (MBS) is the number one easy-to-use MSP backup solution for Managed Service
Providers and IT departments worldwide. MBS allows MSPs to leverage the power of public cloud storage like
AWS, Microsoft Azure, Backblaze B2, and Wasabi to increase profit while delivering best-in-class data protection
to their customers.

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