, do you need to back up the host itself or guest VMs as well?

I have installed the VM version of cloudberry software and I'm doing the Hyper-V backup plan. I really only care about the hyper-v machines getting backed up but this brings up another question: When I do a Hyper-V Backup Plan is it only backing up the Hyper-V guests and not anything on the Host? If so, what would be the best way to back up the Host as well as the hyper-v guests?

What I like about the Hyper-v backup plan is that I'm able to restore individual files from the guests if needed without having to restore an entire vhd and mount it, etc.

However, for my immediate need, I'm just interested in backing up theses guests nightly and staying within my 500GB a month bandwidth limit.

Thanks!

You can use file and image-based plans to back up your the host, there should be no problems with that.

What about my original question? What is the best way to backup these virtual machines using the Hyper-V backup without going over 500GB a month backup limit? Altogether the hyper-V guest add up to about 467GB. I understand that the initial backup as well as incrementals for the first month may make me go over. However, once I have my initial full backup, how would I be able to only do incrementals going forward, or some kind of synthetic full backup without going over 500GB every subsequent month?

Synthetic full for VM backups is not yet available, so these plans would require normal full backups for proper versioning and purging.
Bandwidth cap is a pretty serious limitation, especially if we're talking about cloud backups, so, to be honest, I only see 2 ways to resolve this:
1) Install Server/Ultimate edition on each of your PCs and do image-based backups with synthetic full.
2) Upgrade your internet plan.

Synthetic for VMs should be introduced once we roll out our archive mode update.

Any rough planned ETA on the archive mode update? :)