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Jason
Asked: 2009-06-17 13:57:04 +0800 CST

What is a good backup plan for Hyper-V Virtual Images?

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I have one machine with Hyper-V (not the bare metal version - the Windows 2008 OS version) that we are experimenting with.

I would love to backup from the host OS and not from each individual virtual machine. I would love to be able to simply make a copy of the virtual drives and/or virtual machine, to my backup drive.

To do this, I need to use Shadow Copy Services... I understand... but how?

It should be easy enough to do with RoboCopy, but RoboCopy doesn't support Shadow Copy Services.

What is the next best thing? What is the easiest way to backup these computers to another mapped drive?

windows-server-2008 backup hyper-v maintenance

2 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    One thing you can do if you want to use robocopy with volume shadow copies is use the VShadow tool from MS (http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb530725.aspx)

    I've outlined a brief approach below, you'd want to create a batch script to automate this process but it isn't too difficult.

    You can create a shadow copy using the vshadow tool. Following this, using the -el flag (with vshadow again) you can expose the shadow copy under a drive letter (like x:). Following this you can use robocopy to create backups from the mounted shadow copy drive.

    I've outlined a rough script below, note this hasn't been tested. It takes a shadow copy of C: and mounts it as X:

    setlocal
IF NOT "%CALLBACK%" == "" GOTO :VS_CALLBACK 

set CALLBACK=%~dpnx0
vshadow.exe -p -script=TempScript.cmd -exec=%CALLBACK% C: 

:VS_CALLBACK  
setlocal
call TempScript.cmd
vshadow.exe -el=%SHADOW_ID_1%,X:

del /f TempScript.cmd

robocopy X:\ \\backup\server

    Obviously the robocopy command needs to be customised to suit whatever you're doing (copy VHD's from some location etc). Hopefully this is helpful!

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