Hi community
I have been using Win 8 Hyper V, to build a number of SharePoint 2010 and 2013 test farms. Essentially, set up a windows 2012 parent disk with some common stuff such as all the browsers, fiddler and ULS logger. Thereafter, I can reference my parent disk when I create my individual child diff disks( New-VHD). Now I am able to install SharePoint 2010 or 2013 without the hassle of having install the operating system each time.
Now I want backup these diff disks ahead of testing a CU or other farm changes, so I wondered what is the best approach here:
- Use Hyper-v snapshot facility: how many of these, how often, and how reliable are these? Also, if I need to backup my snapshot files is there best practices here as to which ones I need to backup
- Go for physical backup of the my hyper-v: VHX and config files and if so what are the key files to backup. I had look at my spdev installation (see attachment) and there appears to be a load of related files – how are these created and do I need to back these all up.?
Daniel
Well, keep in mind none of these are recommended/supported for SharePoint (differencing disks, snapshot, online backup). But snapshots are more of a ‘state’ rather than a backup/restore point, if backup means shipping it off to tape, etc. If you’re just testing, though, and want to quickly roll a VM backup, snapshots are ok in a non-production environment. I do this with my dev single-server VMs. I wouldn’t recommend it in a multi-server farm.
