Hey All,
Here’s a topic I’d like to beat against the wall for a while…
- Backups suck, plain and simple. unless you pay through the nose for a backup software (and sometimes not even then), bare metal backups don’t seem to be an option for windows.
- I don’t have a problem with backups on linux. Piece of cake, tar the machine. machine dies, re-install base os, untar over the top, 100% perfect machine… every time!!!
Windows, no…
So my solution is to virtualize everything (more for other reasons, but you’ll see where I’m going).
Linux, still not a problem, I actually rsync my clients linux servers back to a large data center. No problem, awesome solution… Windows, still not so cool
HOWEVER!!!
Along comes KVM! 
very happy same function no matter what.
PROBLEM… 
Windows server; accounting firm; tax season; working long hours. Don’t have the time to pause the windows server vm, copy the 60gb image file to backup drive, then restart the windows vm.
Any recommendations? Yes, this is Windows 2008, so crappy windows backup solution. As well as I would like to rsync the image to a backup server at another location so if the server for this client craps out I can simply run the other server out to his office, start up the VM images and hes back up and running in less then an hour.
Oh, this is hardware level virtualization.
Thanks!
Greg