Hi,

We had a customer ask about backups of images of their VM disk. This

is not currently a service that we offer.

It has some advantages, so it could be a service that we offer.

The main advantage being:

- High degree of confidence that the VM is just able to be one-click

  restored and is then bootable and working, as it's an exact image

  of the disk

It does of course also have a heap of disadvantages such as:

- Granularity of backup is "the entire disk". No way to pick and

  choose what is backed up except by putting things on different OS

  disks.

- It's based off a disk snapshot so nothing in memory gets

  preserved; a restore event will be similar to a "boot after

  unexpected power cut" event to the restored VM. Though doing the

  snapshot while the VM is powered off for a few seconds would be

  an option.

- This obviously uses a lot of disk space which we'd charge for at

  our archive storage rate: £0.40+VAT/50GB/month. If preferred this

  could go onto third party cloud storage but bear in mind that

  Amazon S3 is about 3 times the cost of BitFolk's archive storage.

- Limited differential backups are possible though I'm yet to fully

  understand how well that works. All I can say right now is that

  a differential would use less, but I'm not sure really how much

  less.

So, there would be "some charge" for the service itself and

definitely a charge at archive storage rates for the actual amount

of storage involved.

If this sounds like a service that you think you'd actually want,

please get in touch off-list and we'll see if we can develop it.

As it's more the BitFolk way for customers to do this sort of thing

themselves I don't really expect this to be widely desired, but I am

working on it for one customer anyway so if I can make it more

generally applicable then I will.

Thanks,

Andy