Server Backup

Server backup of Vinchin Backup & Recovery allows customers to take backups of entire Linux and Windows server’s operating system or specific volume(s) of the physical server.

Before creating a server backup job, make sure you had installed the physical backup agents on the target Linux or Windows servers, please refer to Agents for how to deploy agents for server backup.

Create Server Backup Job

To create server backup jobs, please go to Physical Backup > Server Backup > Backup page. There are 4 steps to create a server backup job.

Step 1: Backup Source

Select the hosts you want to backup from the Group tree, expand the group until you see the hosts. Select the host(s) you need to back up, the selected host(s) will be added to the Select Host(s) column.

Click on the selected host(s), you can select or exclude the partition(s) or disk(s) from this backup job by unticking the front check box of the partition(s) or disk(s). For Windows Operating System, EFI system partition and Microsoft reserved partition will be selected and backed up by default.

For Linux servers, boot partition is selected and will be backed up by default.

Notice

1. Windows servers only which file system type is NTFS support partition backup.

2. Windows servers which disk type is Dynamic does not support backup.

3. Windows disk state is offline or uninitialized cannot be backed up.

4. Windows servers must have at least 300MB free space in each partition.

5. Windows servers protected by security software may fail to back up.

Step 2: Backup Destination

On the Backup Destination page, you need to specify a backup storage to save your backup data.

In the Target Node dropdown list, you can select a backup node on which you want the backup data to be processed and stored.

In the Target Storage dropdown list, the storages which belong to the selected backup node can be selected.

When done selecting the backup storage, please click on Next button to continue.

Step 3: Backup Strategies

Under the General Strategy tab, you can setup the backup Time Schedule, Throttling Policy, Data Storage Policy, Retention Policy and Advanced Strategy.

To determine the backup window of this job, the Time Windows indicator can be a reference for you to determine in which time window the job should be scheduled.

In the Mode dropdown list, you can choose the backup mode of this backup job, you can configure the job as a Backup as Scheduled job or an Once-off Backup job.

For a once-off backup job, the job will only run for once, and only full backup will be performed. You only have to appoint a time of when to start the backup job in the Start Time field.

For a Backup as Scheduled job, you can schedule full, incremental, differential and even forever incremental backups for the server backup job as per your needs.

By clicking on the + icon, you can configure when exactly to run the backup job on daily, weekly or monthly basis.

Usually, it’s recommended to run the full backups on weekly basis and run the incremental backups on daily basis. For the throttling policy settings, it’s optional, only the highly efficient backup process will impact on the server performance, you can choose to configure the throttling policy to limit the backup speed.

Data Storage Policy including Deduplication, Compression and Encryption of the backup data.

By enabling Data Deduplication and Data Compression, you can save the bandwidth and storage resources for transmitting and storing the backup data.

By enabling Data Encryption, the backup data will be encrypted and then stored into the backup storage. A password needs to be specified to secure the data encryption, when creating a server restore job, password verification is required to perform server restore.

For the Retention Policy, it can be used to define how much/long the backup data to be reserved in the backup storage, you can either define the retention policy with Number of Restore Points or Number of Days mode.

If you only enable full backup for the server backup job, only full restore points will be generated, and to comply with the retention policy, the restore point exceeded the given number of restore points or number of days will be directly deleted.

For the incremental backup jobs, to comply with the retention policy, Vinchin backup server will merge the first full backup with the following incremental backup restore points to comply with the retention policy. If it’s a forever incremental backup job, Vinchin backup server will always merge backup restore points. If there are full backups to be taken regularly, then the first full backup will be merged with the incremental backup restore points between the first and the second full backup restore points one by one, when there’s no incremental backup between the first and the second full backup, the first full backup restore point will be deleted at the next run of the job.

For differential backup jobs, Vinchin backup server will delete the first differential backup restore point to comply with the retention policy, if all differential backup restore points between the first and the second full backup restore points had been deleted, the first full backup restore point will be deleted at the next run of the job.

For the Transfer Threads, you can define 1 to 8 transfer threads for a single server backup job to implement multithreaded transmission.

If the high efficient backup process will impact on the server performance, please decrease the transfer threads number or consider enabling Throttling Policy.

Under the Transmission Strategy tab, users can enable Encrypted Transfer and select transmission network for this backup job.

By enabling Encrypted Transfer, the transmission path between the physical server and Vinchin backup server will be encrypted to guarantee you data safety during backup process.

If your backup server has multiple networks connected, in the Transmission Network dropdown list, you can select a network to carry out the data transmission.

Under the Advanced Strategy tab, you can configure the Valid Data Extraction option.

You can enable Quiesced Snapshot to keep file systems or applications of the sever in a consistent state via application-awareness processing. Before taking the snapshot, Applications on Windows OS are required to support Microsoft VSS.

You can enable CBT to run server incremental backups for faster backup speed. (Please ensure that you have clicked on install driver when installing the server agent.)

This option can be used to extract the valid data of the server partitions, in order to reduce the backup storage usage.

Step 4: Review & Confirm

After completing the above-mentioned settings, you are able to review and confirm the settings in one screen. A job name can be specified for identification of the VM backup jobs, and by clicking on the Submit button to confirm the settings and create the backup job.