Virtual Machine Backup Software Guide & Tutorial Links

Virtual machine backup software is a new class of disaster recovery tools and deserves special attention. While some products are all-in-one backup software solutions, such as BackupChain, other tools may be for virtual backup only.

We put together a list of virtual machine guides and how-to tutorials for your convenience that describe how to backup VMs on various virtualization platforms:

Virtual Machine Backup Software Overview: An overview of backup software tool features needed for virtual machine backups.

How to Create a Live Backup of Virtual Machines While Running. This describes how live backups of virtual machines may be set up quickly and easily.

How to Clone a Virtual Machine Virtual Machines are different from physical machines in that they can be cloned. This article describes how a virtual machine clone can be created.

Efficient VMware Workstation and VMware Server Backups Taking backups is more than just copying files. The article describes how VMware Workstation backups are made on the granular as well as the full VM level.

Software for Hyper-V Virtual Machine Backup Each virtualization platform requires specialized handling when it comes to management and backups. This article is specifically about Hyper-V and Hyper-V virtual machines are backed up.

How to Restore a Virtual Machine This article describes how to restore a virtual machine and the steps required.

Deduplication of Virtual Machine Backups in Hyper-V and VMware Deduplication is an enormously useful tool in modern virtual machine backup software because it can save over 95% of storage space. This article offers details on how it works and how to set it up.

File/Folder-based Method for Virtual Machine Backups Some virtual machine host platforms may be backed up using a file folder-based backup method described in this post.

Virtual machine backups differ in many ways from physical server backups. Ideally, IT admins should be treating them differently and use the appropriate backup method.

Backing up VMs from the Host vs. from within the VM This is an interesting subject that all IT admins face. While it is usually cheaper and more efficient to run virtual machine backups from the host, there are some scenarios that require a virtual machine backup to run inside the guest VM.

How to Backup Windows 8 / 8.1 Hyper-V Virtual Machines Windows 8 and 8.1 Hyper-V is here and so is a dedicated Hyper-V backup tool for Client Hyper-V. You don’t have to buy a Windows Server to benefit from all the server-grade backup features out there.

Restore Virtual Machine Files using Granular Restore Granular Restore, along with Granular Backup, are great innovations that save time and money but also allow IT admins to run very specialized and efficient backups. Restore time is also dramatically reduced when you use granular restore.

Tips on How to Backup and Restore a Hyper-V Virtual Machine Backup and restore for Hyper-V virtual machines is easy but there are still tips and tricks and time-savers that are great to know.

Key Benefits of Using Hyper-V Backup Software for Virtual Machine Backup There are many ways to ‘skin a cat’; however, the best virtual machine backup strategy should always involve a specialized backup tool. This article describes key benefits of using specialized backup software.

Live Hyper-V Backup using Hyper-V VSS Writer: How Backup Works The Hyper-V VSS Writer is a very complex animal. This very detailed, in-depth article gets you up to date with the inner workings of the Hyper-V live backup process and gives valuable pointers as to what you need to watch out for.

18 Virtual Machine and Hyper-V Backup Pitfalls You Need to Know There are many ways things can go wrong when it comes to virtual machine backup and disaster recovery. This very useful article describes a whopping 18 pitfalls in full detail and gives recommendations on how to avoid common backup and restore issues in Hyper-V.

Snapshots / Checkpoints versus Full Virtual Machine Backups All virtualization platforms offer snapshots a.k.a. checkpoints, and unfortunately some users believe these are good for disaster recovery. This article describes how virtual machine backups are completely different from snapshots and why this is the case.

Best Practices for Virtual Machine Backup and Other Services Best practices for virtual machine backups are listed in this post with tips and tricks on how to optimize your time and storage.

How to use Automated, Single-Click Hyper-V Backup This page shows screenshots and gives step-by-step instructions on how to set up automatic Hyper-V virtual machine backup with just a few clicks.

While many users deploy VMware, Hyper-V, VMware Workstation, VirtualBox is also gaining ground. Using BackupChain you can back up all your VMs on all three major virtual machine host platforms, as well as, Virtual PC and Virtual Server.

What sets this tool apart from others is that it was designed for IT professionals who need to fine-tune their backups to fit dissimilar customer environments. BackupChain permits each type of file to be treated differently; you can fine-tune deduplication, compression, and complex retention rules as needed for each type of file separately.

Instead of having to purchase several backup tools for each platform, BackupChain provides you with all tools you need for each platform, including physical server backups and file server backups.

A risk-free, fully functional 20 day trial version is available here for download.

BackupChain Features

What else does BackupChain offer? BackupChain is much more than just a backup copy tool. It offers Hyper-V backup, VMware backup, live VM backup, Windows Server 2012 R2 backup, and VirtualBox backup.
Other than virtual machine backup and local physical server backup, we also offer cloud backup plans from 100GB to 35TB on each account!