Best Hyper-V Backups Tools

The time to start backing up your Hyper-V environment is yesterday. Backups can't simply wait for tomorrow or the next season. Failure of a single VM or group of VMs may lead to business interruption and substantial financial loss. Even worse, if you fall victim to a powerful Ransomware attack, all your data could be lost and fall into the wrong hands. To protect VM data and applications from these potential risks, you should start backing up now.

Backups don’t need to be complicated. Various automatic tools can perform backups or replications in a “set-it-and-forget-it” mode if you configure them right from the beginning.

In this comparison guide, we'll go through the top 10 for Hyper-V backups. These automatic backup tools make periodic backups to take care of the data and configuration of your VMs. Then, when and if failure happens, you can quickly restore your backup to a previous point in time.

Here is our list of the best Hyper-V Backup Tools

1. SolarWinds Virtualization Manager – EDITOR’S CHOICE Full monitoring, management, and remediation for Hyper-V environments. Automatically cleans orphaned or zombie VHDX files before backup. Get the 30-day free trial.
2. N-able Cove Data Protection – FREE TRIAL This cloud-based service will backup, restore, and replicate physical and virtual systems, including Hyper-V implementations. Start with a 30-day free trial.
3. Acronis Cyber Protect – FREE TRIAL A highly scalable data protection solution for VM environments. Start a 30-day free trial.
4. Veeam Backup & Replication A robust backup, restore, and replication solution for virtual environments. It provides image-based snapshots, full, and incremental backups.
5. Altaro VM Backup A highly scalable backup, restore, and replication solution for Hyper-V.
6. Iperius Backup Software to backup Windows PCs and Servers, databases, and virtual machines.
7. Vembu Backup & Disaster Recovery A comprehensive BDR solution for virtual, physical, cloud workloads, and applications.
8. Nakivo Backup and Replication A powerful tool that performs full and incremental backups for VMs.
9. Uranium Backup Robust backup, recovery, and replica for Hyper-V and other hypervisors
10. Veritas NetBackup Enterprise backup and recovery suite. It provides image-level (snapshot), full, and incremental Hyper-V backups.
11. IBM Spectrum Protect Agentless enterprise backup and restore solution.

Hyper-V Backup Tools

If you are not backing up your Hyper-V production environment, you should start immediately. If you are already backing up, you can start by optimizing your next backup, by improving its methodology or reducing its size to make the process faster and more efficient.

In large VM deployments, orphaned virtual machines, or zombie VHD files can take a large portion of storage— which only makes the backup process longer, creates more traffic, and is more expensive. So, look for a VM manager such as SolarWinds VMAN which can provide a contextual dependency map and help control VM Sprawl.

What to look for in Hyper-V backup tools?

Hyper-V backup tools can help you keep your VM environment up and running, even during outages. A Hyper-V backup tool should also help you manage your backups, provide replication, and restore capabilities.

When looking for Hyper-V backup tools, look for features like:

• Compression and deduplication: to reduce storage needs and traffic on the network.
• Incremental backup technology. With technologies like Changed Block Tracking (CBT) or Resilient Change Tracking (RCT).
• Volume Shadow Copy Service (VSS) for application-consistent snapshots.
• Multiple storage options. Backup to on-prem storage or cloud.

Additionally, look for scalable solutions. You may be already backing up VMs and storing copies in on-prem storage, but if your VM environment is growing, you might need other scalable storage alternatives or replication solutions.

The Best 10 Tools for Hyper-V Backups

1. SolarWinds Virtualization Manager – FREE TRIAL

The SolarWinds Virtualization Manager (VMAN) provides robust monitoring, management, and remediation for Hyper-V virtualization environments. This software comes with a comprehensive list of useful features to help you quickly find, fix, and optimize any performance issues in your VM environment.

Features

• Virtual DNA. Shows you historical changes made to VM configurations for easier troubleshooting.
• Contextual dependency map. Learn about the dependencies between VMs and application groups, storages, clusters, and hosts.
• Predictive recommendations. Actionable and predictive intelligence to help prevent (and fix) performance issues.
• VM Sprawl Control. Free up and reclaim wasted virtual resources, by identifying idle, stale, or zombie VMs. Additionally, right-size under-allocated or overallocated VMS.

SolarWinds VMAN comes with comprehensive dashboards to show you Hyper-V server performance, mapping of all VMs to their underlying host, storage, objects, alerts, and more.

Using SolarWinds VMAN before backing up large environments is key because it helps you prepare for a more efficient and smaller backup. It checks the VMs configurations and cleans orphaned virtual machines.

Price: Starts at $2,995.00 for eight sockets. To learn about SolarWinds VMAN price, get a quote.

2. N-able Cove Data Protection – FREE TRIAL

N-able Cove Data Protection is a SaaS platform that gives you controls to backup and restore your system and also includes storage space on cloud servers. The service includes special procedures for backing up Hyper-V implementations. N-able Cove Data Protection is also able to backup VMWare systems plus cloud services, such as Microsoft 365.

Features

• Backs up all VMs as well as the virtual server in Hyper-V
• Includes a guided restore wizard and can also be used for replication
• Strong security for data in motion and at rest
• Copies are also stored locally in cache for fast recovery

The N-Able system can manage multi-vendor sites and even multiple sites for the same account. The service has no problem backing up other cloud accounts. All transfers are protected by AES encryption with a 256-bit key. This encryption is also applied to data at rest and your entire cloud storage account will be mirrored on another server in a different data center for extra security.

Price: For more information on pricing, contact N-able.

Download: Access a 30-day free trial.

Start 30-day Free Trial!

3. Acronis Cyber Protect – FREE TRIAL

Acronis Cyber Protect is a modern data protection and disaster recovery tool for virtual, physical, cloud, and mobile environments. It can secure data for individual consumers, SMBs, or scale to Enterprise-size.

Features

• Support for RCT for incremental backups.
• vmFlasback technology to reduce VM recovery time.
• Volume Shadow Copy Service (VSS) for application-consistent snapshots.
• Convert a physical machine backup to Hyper-V VM
• Migrate Hyper-V to any system (bare metal or virtual).

Acronis Cyber Protect provides agentless backups for Hyper-V environments. You can configure the tool to store copies of your backup in local storage, cloud, or hybrid environments.

The tool comes with a web-based management console to monitor alerts, storage activities, etc., or create automatic backup tasks. From this console, you can also restore all Hyper-V hosts and VMs.

Price: Protect an unlimited number of VMs on the same host with no additional costs/VM or socket. For more information on pricing, get a quote.

Download: Register to download a 30-day free trial of Acronis Cyber Protect.

Start a 30-day Free Trial!

4. Veeam Backup & Replication

Veeam Backup & Replication is a robust backup, restore, and replication solution for virtual environments. It can back up/restore VMs, physical servers, and cloud-based workloads.

Features

• Backups are app-aware. Image-level backup (snapshot) of VSS-aware applications.
• Track changes for faster backups. CBT for Hyper-V to increase the speed of incremental backups.
• Scale-out backup repository. Intelligently move older backup copies to the cloud.
• VM backup health checks. Keep updated with +340 preset alarms and +150 pre-built reports.

Veeam Backup & Replication performs backups at the image-level using Hyper-V snapshots, to retrieve VM's data at any point in time. It can also perform either a full VM backup or an incremental backup using the Changed Block Tracking (CBT) mechanism.

When it comes to restoring a Hyper-V backup, Veeam can restore full VMs quickly, or recover individual files or application items inside a Hyper-V backup.

Price: For more information on pricing, visit Veeam Pricing and Packaging or request a quote.

Download. Register to Veeam to download a free trial.

5. Altaro VM Backup

Altaro VM Backup is a robust backup and replication tool for Hyper-V and VMware hypervisors, and physical servers. It is highly scalable. It can handle small VM environments, grow to IT departments, and scale to large environments such as MSPs.

Features

• Award-winning customer support. Known for fast response and top expertise.
• Advanced functionality. Deduplication, offsite replication, file & exchange item-level restore, hot backups, and more.
• Real-time change tracking for Hyper-V with Change Block Tracking (CBT).
• Backup health-checks. Monitor the health of backups and repair blocks for the next backup.
• Support for Hyper-V clusters. Support of CSV and SMB3.

This tool is designed to be easy to install and use. You can manage all the backups and hosts from a single console, and perform quick backups with Altaro's Augmented Inline Deduplication process.

Altaro VM Backup provides a cloud dashboard and a simple setup of off-site backup servers. It supports multiple cloud storage options, such as Azure, Amazon S3, and Wasabi.

Price: The price starts at $515 for the Standard Edition— a one-time price for up to 5VMs per Hyper-V host. For more pricing information, get a quote.

Download: Download the Free Edition for up to 2 VMs per host. Or Get a fully functional 30-day trial of Altaro VM Backup (Unlimited Plus Edition).

6. Iperius Backup

Iperius Backup is a comprehensive backup software for Windows. It can backup PCs, servers, databases, and virtual machines, including Microsoft Hyper-V hypervisor and others. It can perform three types of backups, full (copies all files), incremental (copies new or changed files), and differential backups (Complete + Incremental) for your Hyper-V environment.

Features

• Perform hot backups of Hyper-V without agents.
• Resilient Change Tracking (RCT) and differential backups (CBT).
• Restore Hyper-V VMs to different hosts.
• VM replication from host to host or from datastore to datastore.

The tool provides backup technologies such as Resilient Change Tracking (RCT) technology and block-level backups to improve the efficiency and speed of Hyper-V backups. You can store multiple incremental or differential restore points and configure the software to automatically restore (even send it to different hosts).

Once your backup is ready, you can send it to cloud storage, local NAS, disk, or a tape device. You can choose to restore the full backup or opt to restore individual files.

Price: A single license for unlimited hosts and virtual machines. The price for Iperius Backup Advanced VM starts at $260.00.

Download Iperius Backup Free or a free fully-featured trial of Iperius Advanced.

7. Vembu Backup & Disaster Recovery

Vembu Backup & Disaster Recovery (BDR) is a complete backup solution for virtual machines, physical machines, cloud workloads, and SaaS. Vembu BDR can be set to backup VMs along with applications and data locally and send a replication copy to Vembu Cloud.

Additional Features

• Supports Hyper-V Cluster, CSV, S2D, and SMB share
• Image-based Application-aware backups for MS applications residing on Hyper-V.
• Incremental backups with Resilient Change Tracking (RCT) for Hyper-V VMs.
• Flexible restores and migrations. Supports Cross-Hypervisor migration support (V2V)

Vembu BDR supports agentless VM backups for Hyper-V Standalone Hosts and Cluster Servers. Backup your Hyper-V VMs or clusters whether they are running on local storage, SMB share, CSV, or Storage Spaces Direct (S2D).

Once a backup is finished, Vembu automatically verifies and notifies you of its recoverability. You can instantly recover the entire VM, a single file (or files), or an application-item.

Price: Licenses-based subscription or perpetual. For perpetual (VM-level pricing) Free, Standard Essential ($45/VM), Standard ($90/VM), Enterprise Essentials($75/VM), Enterprise ($45/VM).

Download Vembu’s free version without restrictions for up to 10VMs. Additionally, you can also download a 30-day free trial of the Vembu BDR Standard edition.

8. NAKIVO Backup and Replication

NAKIVO is a software development company that specializes in data protection for virtual, physical, cloud, and SaaS environments. NAKIVO’s Backup and Replication tool provides an integrated approach to data and application protection. It can perform image-based, application-aware, incremental backup and replications.

Features

• Supports RCT for Hyper-V.
• Incremental-aware backups.
• Backup data reduction.
• Instant backup verification.

With NAKIVO Backup and Replication, you can go directly to compressed or deduplicated backups and instantly recover full VMs, single files, or application objects. Additionally, you can recover data across different platforms, VMware to Hyper-V environments, and vice versa.

NAKIVO can back up your Hyper-V VMs to the cloud (Amazon S3, Microsoft Azure, Wasabi), or local tape.

Price: Perpetual license per CPU socket + one year of standard support. The price for the “Basic License” starts at $99/socket. For more information request a quote.

Download. Register to download a free trial of NAKIVO Backup & Replication.

9. Uranium Backup Pro Virtual

Uranium Backup Pro Virtual provides virtual machine backup, restore, and replication for Hyper-V and VMware hosts. It can perform full, incremental, and differential backups on any of these VM environments.

Features

• Thin provisioning to speed up backup and reduce disk usage.
• Replicas to minimize RTO and allow instant VM recovery.
• Off-site backup. Copy to your backup to a cloud service.
• USilio. An IT management console to organize, monitor, and run backups.

Uranium also supports hot VM backups with thin provisioning allocation on any Hyper-V host. The output is a .VHDX file which is compatible with Hyper-V and which allows full manual recovery. The thin provisioning feature reduces disk space utilization and speeds up the copying process.

Additionally, you can integrate Uranium Backup Pro Virtual, with cloud backup services, including Amazon S3, Microsoft Azure, Google Drive, and Dropbox.

Price: There are different editions of Uranium Backup at different prices. The price for their Base Edition starts at $95 for a one-time payment. They also offer a free edition.

Download the Uranium Backup Free Edition or activate the 21-day Gold Edition free trial.

10. Veritas NetBackup

Veritas NetBackup (former Symantec NetBackup) is an enterprise backup and recovery suite. It has been named a 15-times leader in the 2020 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Data Center Backup and Recovery Solutions.

Features

• Snapshot technology using VSS and WMI.
• Full and file-level incremental VM backups.
• Block-level incremental and accelerator backups.
• Restore VM backup to other locations of Hyper-V server (or different server).

Veritas NetBackup for Hyper-V, can either provide snapshot-based backups or full-to-incremental backups for VMs on Hyper-V servers. The tool uses agentless image-level backups, plus granular recovery technology to restore entire images or individual objects from the same backup.

This tool also provides automatic discovery and backup technology to protect new, changed, or moved VMs. This ensures that no VM is left from being protected.

Price: Request a quote.

11. IBM Spectrum Protect

IBM Spectrum Protect (former Tivoli Storage Manager) is an agentless enterprise backup and restore solution. It is highly scalable, as it can manage an outstanding number of objects per backup. Additionally, it gives a single point of control to manage all backups and recoveries.

Features

• Progressive incremental backups.
• Backups using RCT.
• Policy-based management at VM-level.
• Source and target deduplication.
• Compression for reduced storage.
• Built-in cloud integration.

IBM Spectrum Protect for Virtual Environments provides data protection for Hyper-V environments. It provides incremental or full backups for your Hyper-V VMs. It can also take snapshots of the VM and backs it up to the IBM Spectrum Protect server. You can restore the entire VM to an alternative location or only individual files from a VM.

The solution also offers a wide variety of storage options, from on-prem to cloud.

Price: Contact sales

Launch an IBM Spectrum Protect Interactive Demo.

Choosing the right tool for Hyper-V backups

Before backing up your Hyper-V environment, look for those orphaned or zombie VMs that are taking a lot of precious disk space, isolate them, and backup “only” what is necessary. For that process, you may want to use a tool such as SolarWinds Virtualization Manager (VMAN) to clean up your VM environment, so you don’t end up backing up useless VMs and wasting storage.

Most of the tools for Hyper-V backups mentioned in this list offer a free edition. But bear in mind that these “free editions” are suitable only for home use and sometimes, small businesses. For instance, free solutions such as Veeam Community Edition or Altaro VM Backup Free edition are good options for backing up Hyper-V VMs in relatively small environments. These free tools have similar functionalities as their full-priced editions when backing up a few instances, but can’t scale.

Paid backup products from Veeam Altaro, Iperius Backup, Vembu, Nakivo, Uranium Backup, or Acronis Cyber Backup are great for SMBs and some can scale to enterprise-size environments. Lastly, products like Veritas NetBackup and IBM Spectrum Protect were purpose-built for enterprise backups.

Hyper-V backups FAQs