Thanks!

Spinning up a VM directly from the backup would be very nice feature!

Thanks Alexander Negrash.

Can you or can anyone else that uses this share any best practices that I should be aware of? Are there limitations?

Sorry for the delay in responding. Thanks. This information is very helpful.

These both seem like good features to consider adding to MSP360.

We did a successful restore of a VMware file server to a Hyper-V Host yesterday. Thanks to others on this forum and to MSP360 support for the assistance.

Before the successful restore we did one new format image backup plan of the C: and the E: drives. We restored all drives simultaneously.

We restored from a NAS to the host and the approx. 500 GB server took about 1.5 hrs. to transfer from the NAS to the server.

We encountered 2 minor issues.
1. We had to set up the NIC after restore to get network connectivity as it lost its VMware NIC in when it changed hosting. This I'm sure is a function of the hosting change not MSP360.
2. The backed up server had a C: and an E: drive. The C: drive held the OS and the E: drive the file server shares. After the restore the shares did not function. Upon review it turned out that the E: drive had taken the drive letter D: in lieu of E:. Upon changing the drive letter back to E: the share began working again.

Steve,

Thanks for sharing this. Some of our image backups from workstations are quite big. I can try to go back to see if we are excluding temp, recycle bin, etc. folders. Can you think of any other folders that you typically exclude from the image backup?

I see what you are saying about keeping a ready to use computer in the case of a failure. I like the idea of being able to restore to the original hardware or a loaner computer the image when or if a failure occurs. It seems that this can often save time.

I am surprised though that on a computer with 100GB on a drive that 20GB needs to be backed up on some daily image backups. Even with the temp OS changes, user file changes, and AV updates, this 20GB seems to be quite large. I would have expected 2GB of backup size instead of 20GB for the daily image backups.

Ironically Windows Servers seem to have smaller daily image backups compared to Windows workstations. This is spite of many servers running active directory and/or serving as file servers for multiple users.

Many of the computers that we work with have solid state drives now so the defrag process should not be a factor. I don't assume that MSP360 backs up any data in the SSD drive set aside for trim and active garbage collection, is that correct?

Thanks Steve Putnam. Very helpful!

Thanks Steve! Good to know this is well supported.

Right now we do a files backup hourly during the workday both to a NAS as well as to a cloud storage location. We have the cloud storage location chained to the local backup schedule.

We do an image backup to the NAS and to a cloud storage location, We have the cloud storage location chained to the local backup schedule.

We do a monthly full backup for each.

Is this all doable within the Hyper-V environment with MSP360?

Also, do you or does anyone else know if you can migrate from VMware to Hyper-V using a restore from the image MSP360 backup of the VM's?

Thanks David. That is helpful information. Yes, image backups. Yes, new format.

Thanks again! I appreciate your good advise and excellent product knowledge.

I think that this issue if now resolved.

What did not work for us was upgrading the software via the MSP360 portal. Doing this normally had no effect on replacing our icon with our new improved icon.

On most computers upgrading the MSP360 software via a script (installing a newer version of MSP360 or installing the same version of MSP360, did the trick. The script we used was: BackupName_v7.3.2.6_ALLEDITIONS_Setup.exe /S

Obviously we used the actual backupname per the branding and install file name in the script command.

On a couple of computers we had to uninstall MSP360 via the Control Panel / Programs and Features. After the software was again installed via the script this fixed the icon issues.

Thanks for the help!

Has anyone tried to exclude C:\Windows\SoftwareDistribution ?

Copied from another posting...
Another possible excludable item:
The Recycle Bin is normally located on every disk, off the root, in the following location:
<DRIVE>:\$Recycle.Bin

Thanks David!

David,

Thank you for this information.

Just to confirm, this question involves the quick recovery of a non-VM workstation or server, to a VM, to be operated temporarily until the failed computer can be replaced. Can you tell me what you mean by “install our backup software on each virtual machine”? The restore will be accomplished to create a VM of the failed physical. Since we are having difficulty creating the VM, I can’t envision how we would install your backup software on the virtual machine.

Thank you David. I appreciate your insight and suggestions.

IvanS,

Thanks for your offer. We do a daily Block-level incremental backup, and once a month a Full backup. On the day that the monthly Full backup runs we set the start time of the Full backup to be 15 minutes prior to the daily Block-level incremental backup believing that the daily backup will be skipped on this one day a month.

Our current retention policy is to keep 30 versions, to delete versions older than 1 month, and to always keep the last version.

Our business requirement is to keep a minimum of 30 days of backups. If more can be kept for less money, or for the same amount of money in storage cost, that is fine.

Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks for the very helpful suggestions!

Thanks. I have contacted them.

This is a fairly urgent situation as users are having trouble using the server due to slowness.

Not sure how to restore proper server operation, then to figure out what went wrong. Any suggestions would be appreciated.

Also, the application on the CentOS server will not open, I see a small icon jumping up and down then it goes away and nothing opens.