DiskShadow / Xcopy BACKUP of Hyper-V

re: DiskShadow / Xcopy BACKUP of Hyper-V

Dilip Naik — Mon, 15 Mar 2010 22:22:32 GMT

If your VHDs are fixed size, you might want to consider using the free VHDCopy tool posted at www.VMUtil.com .

re: DiskShadow / Xcopy BACKUP of Hyper-V

Paul Williams — Thu, 04 Mar 2010 08:15:05 GMT

Similar subject covered here a few months ago -

http://blog.glo-networks.com/2009/09/25/hyper-v-backups/

re: DiskShadow / Xcopy BACKUP of Hyper-V

Ascendo — Mon, 30 Nov 2009 07:11:56 GMT

We do something similar, except use qpress (www.quicklz.com) to compress the VHD files. It is faster than copying, and uses 70% less disk space.

re: DiskShadow / Xcopy BACKUP of Hyper-V

Cowbelly — Wed, 25 Nov 2009 19:27:06 GMT

I think you are right. I haven't bothered much with cleanup processing - I should pay more attention to all the options in Diskshadow, but I (honestly) like to just use DPM! I love that it's all built in and well integraged.

I created a process like this for Windows Server 2003 using VSSAdmin where I did all the snap management - I guess I should do that again...sometime... in another blog post!

re: DiskShadow / Xcopy BACKUP of Hyper-V

adeoguna — Wed, 25 Nov 2009 16:38:56 GMT

John,

Could you explain what the difference would be with using the "delete shadows exposed Y:" statement as opposed to the "Unexpose Y:" statement? I came out with the impression (from earlier articles on Technet) that the delete shadows exposed Y: statement would actually clean up the shadow copies created during the backup process while the Unexpose Y: statement simply "unexposed" the exposed drive but did not clean up the shadow copies data used for the backups.

I'm asking this question as a result of some problems we've had and a ticket we've had open for nearly six months with PSS because of problems caused, when we used the delete shadows statement in the diskshadow script. The command simply killed WinRM/WMI so that our SCVMM server could no longer communicate with the host server on which the command was run, when Windows Shadow Copies was enabled on the drive hosting the VMs.

I greatly appreciate your postings and any comment you have on this.

Thanks!