How Important to Have a Correct Backup Solution

How Important to Have a Correct Backup Solution. Backup Academy is the best place to go when dealing with virtualization and VM backup.

Recently, Rick Vanover posted an excellent presentation and demo video in the academy about “How to do a backup wrong: Top mistakes.”

Does this topic sound different? We usually hear best practices for backup, etc., from experts like Rick. In this video, he combined his 15 years of experience in IT (virtualization) with an excellent topic.

In this post, I’ll highlight some topics that I found very useful. All my SCCM/ConfigMgr servers are already virtualized (that could be the case for you as well), so it’s essential to understand VM backup-related topics as well.

How Important to Have a Correct Backup Solution

How Important to Have a Correct Backup Solution - Fig.1
How Important to Have a Correct Backup Solution – Fig.1

The content of the video is exciting and of utmost useful if you’re into backup solutions. This video is handy for all IT pros who are using virtual servers to host their application. This would help to understand the gotchas of VM backups.

1) Backup Products should be matched with a platform. VMware, vSphere, and Hyper-V supportability have a big impact.

2) Platforms and Design MUST include the failure domain in the design of backup for VMs.

3) Files, Application Data, and Expectations – Files may not be enough to satisfy restore requirements. Special applications like SCCM and email systems may require special attention while taking backups. Otherwise, the recovery or restoration won’t work as expected.

4) Consistency Levels—Different products on different platforms may offer different consistency levels in backup. VSS was introduced in Windows, which also reduced the overheads of application-level backup.

5) Missing VMs from Backup—Growing virtualization makes “missing VMs” worse. An automatic way to add VMs to the backup solution.

6) Error and Alert Notification—Backup failure notifications and alerts. The right person gets the alerts via Email or pager. The alerts must be addressed properly and resolved in time. Fine-tune the alerts and only require them to be sent across. How Important to Have a Correct Backup Solution

7) Capacity Calculations—Designing a backup solution considers several metrics. DE duplication can help avoid making backups wrong, and Windows Server 2012 can help avoid shortages.

8) Backup Frequency and Avoid Taking the wrong type of backup.

9) It’s always better to keep Multiple copies of backup.

10) Don’t overcomplicate Backup solutions with iSCSI in-guest, Raw Devices Mapping (RDM), etc. How Important to Have a Correct Backup Solution

Resources

Free SCCM Training Part 1 | 17 Hours Of Latest Technical Content | ConfigMgr Lab HTMD Blog (anoopcnair.com)

How To Disable SCCM Application Deployment | ConfigMgr | MEMCM – HTMD Blog #2 (howtomanagedevices.com)

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Author

Anoop C Nair is Microsoft MVP! He is a Device Management Admin with more than 20 years of experience (calculation done in 2021) in IT. He is a Blogger, Speaker, and Local User Group HTMD Community leader. His primary focus is Device Management technologies like SCCM 2012, Current Branch, and Intune. He writes about ConfigMgr, Windows 11, Windows 10, Azure AD, Microsoft Intune, Windows 365, AVD, etc.

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