Hyper-V backup strategies

Data protection strategies are driven primarily by the following requirements:

     Recovery Time Objectives (RTO)

     Recovery Point Objectives (RPO)

     Backup window

Unitrends offers a wide variety of data protection strategies to enable you to meet these requirements for Hyper-V virtual environments. Unitrends recommends using an incremental forever strategy to protect Hyper-V environments. With this strategy, a master is run one time, followed by incrementals thereafter at the frequency that best suits your environment. The system then synthesizes masters locally from the incrementals to ensure quick restores. These synthetic backups are also used for archiving, as incremental backups do not archive directly. For more on synthetic backups, see Synthetic backup and KB 980.

To use the incremental forever strategy, it is recommended that the backup system be on the latest release.

Unitrends supports a variety of other strategy options, described here:

Objective

Strategy

You need to ensure that a full backup completes within the desired window.

Use an incremental forever strategy. Run a Hyper-V full backup one time, then incrementals each day or multiple times per day.

Your tolerance for data loss is measured in a day or more.

Use incremental forever or a weekly Hyper-V full backup with a daily incremental backup.

Your tolerance for data loss is measured in a few hours.

Use incremental forever or a weekly Hyper-V full backup with incremental backups performed with the frequency to meet your RPOs.

Your backups need to complete within a few hours during the week but can run continuously on the weekend.

Use incremental forever or a weekly Hyper-V full backup with daily incremental backups.

You need to control when full backups run.

If system resources are taxed and you would like to control when a full backup runs, use a weekly Hyper-V full backup with incremental backups. Keep in mind that synthetic backups are system-side only and do not impact the client.