You may know the Hyper-V environment provides much high availability and fault tolerance to run virtual machines, such as failover clusters, Live Migration, replication, etc.
They do great favor in minimizing the downtime of the virtual machine in many scenarios, but it does not work in disaster recovery due to human errors, virus attack, or other issues. Thus, it's necessary to create a Hyper-V incremental backup.
In Windows Server 2008 and 2008 R2, using Windows Server Backup for incremental Hyper-V backup is complicated and with many incompatibilities and limitations. To back up Hyper-V virtual machines, one way is from the parent partition. To do that, you need to register the Microsoft Hyper-V VSS writer with Windows Server Backup, which is cumbersome. However, if you want to make it simple by backing up the Hyper-V folder on your hard drive, this might cause the virtual machines not working after the restore.
Luckily, in Windows Server 2012, the Windows Server Backup fully supports backing up Hyper-V virtual machines. You only need to check the Hyper-V items when you choose what to include in the backup. You can also create a scheduled backup to automatically backup virtual machines regularly.
I'll show you how to backup Hyper-V virtual machines in Windows Server 2012 (R2) in this article, using the built-in tool or third-party tools. They apply to Windows Server 2016 Hyper-V backup as well.
👉 Windows Server Hyper-V Backup with Windows Server Backup
👉 Windows Server Hyper-V Backup with Qiling Disk Master Server👍
👉 Centralized Backup Solution to backup multiple Hyper-V VMs🔥
Windows Server Backup is not pre-installed in Windows Server, so you need to install it in Server Manager before you can create backups. It supports creating Windows Server backup hyper-v incremental by default if you run a scheduled backup. And you can set the incremental backup in the Optimize Backup Performance if you find Windows Server Backup not doing incremental backup. Then, check the following steps.
Performing Windows Server Hyper-V backups in Windows Server 2012 and later is easy compared to previous systems. However, it still has some limitations that may slow down your experience.
Qiling Disk Master Server is a Windows Server backup program that provides complete support for Microsoft Hyper-V, VMware, Virtualbox, and other virtual machine software. It supports Windows Server 2003, 2008, 2011, 2012, 2016, 2019, 2022 (including R2), SBS 2003, 2008, 2011, and the corresponding version of Windows PC OS.
With an intuitive interface, Qiling Disk Master Server makes backup and restore Hyper-V virtual machines easier and faster. You can install this software on the Hyper-V for backup and recovery.
🧱 It provides you with various backup methods: file backup, system backup, disk backup, partition backup and email backup, etc. You can choose the most suitable one for you according to your needs.
🧱 It supports you to create automatic backup tasks. You can choose the interval as Daily, Weekly, Monthly, Event triggers or USB plugged in.
🧱 It supports you to create backups to various locations, such as internal and external hard drives, NAS, cloud drives, SD cards, USB flash drives, etc.
🧱 It supports restoring virtual machines to physical machines and vice versa. It also supports you to restore individual files.
✨ Tips:
❤ You can also select Differential Backup here. Each differential backup is independent. From a restore perspective, differential backup is a bit safer than either of the other two. You can also choose Enable Automatic Backup Cleanup to set up automatic cleanup of old backups to save space on the target disk.
❤ You can write a note for your task by clicking on "Options" to help you distinguish it from other backup tasks. In addition, you can enable encryption, compression and email notifications for this task.
If you are an enterprise user who may have multiple VMs that need backing up. So you want an agentless way to perform it. Here we would like to recommend a professional Hyper-V backup solution for enterprises - Qiling Backup. With this tool, you can easily backup all Hyper-V virtual machines and run incremental backups later times.
This professional tool excels at scheduling automated backup tasks for multiple virtual machines, bringing countless benefits to users looking for robust data protection.
• Create a backup schedule to run incremental backup, as well as full backup, and differential backup daily, weekly, and monthly.
• Support store Hyper-V backup in different locations, such as local storage, and external HDD.
• It supports role-based management to assign accounts to your team members with different permissions.
• It supports restoring the entire Hyper-V VM from any backed-up point quickly and easily.
Now you know how to create Windows Server Hyper-V backup in Server 2022/2019/2012/2016/2012 with Windows Server Backup. If you prefer an easier way to set Hyper-V incremental backup, then Qiling Disk Master Server is the way to go. It offers more backup solutions, flexible schedule backup settings, more backup targets (e.g. backup Hyper-V host to a network location), and intuitive user interface, etc.
And it is not only backup software, but also disk clone software and file sync software. Thus, you can use it to clone hard drive in Windows Server 2022, clone hard drive in Windows Server 2016, sync files between Windows Servers, sync files in real time, etc.