How to Backup Server with Best Practices?

What is Server?

Server is a kind of computer with high performance and companies need its hardware resources to support all kinds of system.

Compared with an ordinary desktop computer, server has much powerful performance and doesn't need a monitor because it is often visited by others via network. In addition, server can work continuously for a much longer time than desktop PC because the system needs to required accessible for 7*24 h so server is often rebooted once a week or a month. To reduce downtime, IT administrators need to migrate the system to another server in advance.

Physical server vs virtual server

Server can be directly used with operating system installed so it is used as a physical server. With hypervisor installed on bare-metal server, the hardware resources will be virtualized and then IT administrators can create multiple guests on the server. These guests are called virtual servers or virtual machines.

Generally speaking, as long as you allocate enough hardware resources to virtual server, it can still work as well as physical server and provides much convenience for later maintenance.

Physical server can be simply backup with tranditional backup solution while virtual server user often needs a special backup solution because of the number of virtual servers.

Sometimes you also need to backup server configuration.

Understand server backup strategies

Before choosing a backup solution for server, you should know the basic strategies for server backup.

Backup types: there are generally 3 types of backup modes, full backup, incremental backup, and differential backup. Full backup will backup the entire server every time, incremental backup will save the changed data based on the last backup, and differential backup will save the changed data based on the last full backup. Most backup service vendors will support all of them.

Backup storage: you might want to use storage like local partition or disk, logical volume to store server backup files. Different backup service vendors support different kinds of backup storage so you need to select a proper one.

It is recommended to use both online and offline storage so you can keep backup files in different storage and this will provide better protection to IT environment.

Retention policy: the backup data won't be saved forever and different data should be deleted at different time so you need to make a proper data retention plan. This will help release the pressure of datastore. For example, you can use GFS retention policy to keep a long backup chain with the least storage.

Monitor backup system: server often supports important systems so the backup system needs to be carefully monitored. You can manually check the status of the connection, backup jobs, backup storage status, etc. or find a backup solution including real-time monitoring and reporting.

Virtual server backup software: Vinchin Backup & Recovery

Vinchin Backup & Recovery is a brilliant backup software for virtual server. It has helped thousands of companies to protect virtual environments like VMware vSphere, Hyper-V, Red Hat Virtualization, Citrix Hypervisor (XenServer), OpenStack, Oracle Linux KVM, etc. You can also use it to protect database like Oracle DB, MySQL, SQL Server, PostgreSQL, etc.

Vinchin Backup & Recovery will help you easily add and manage massive virtual servers. Agentless backup allows you to add all the virtual servers to the backup system by adding just the hosts.

The backup procedures are easy. There is a user-friendly web console to help you add, backup, and recover virtual servers with wizards.

There are all kinds of backup strategies for you to choose, like Forever Incremental Backup, Data Deduplication, Data Compression, Data Encryption, Trasnfer Via SAN, etc. and Instant Recovery will let you recover VM of any size in 15 minutes, greatly reducing downtime. Vinchin Virtual Machine Convert Engine can even let you easily move VM between different virtualization platforms.

You can also deploy this brilliant software in your IT environment with a 60-day full-featured free trial. Just click the button to get the installation package.

Sum Up

Server is a kind of computer with high performance and companies need servers to deploy all kinds of business systems. Data on these servers are important so it is necessary to backup servers.

Vinchin Backup & Recovery is a brilliant solution for virtual server backup. Don't miss the free trial.