In most cases it is recommended that you use Hyper-V backups to protect your Hyper-V virtual machines. However, in some instances, you might wish to protect your VMs at the guest OS level and protect them the same way you would protect physical machines. Hyper-V and guest-OS-level backups provide you with different options.
For details, see the following topics:
| • | Comparison between Hyper-V and guest-OS-level backups |
| • | Recommendations and considerations for protecting Hyper-V VMs at the guest OS level |
Note: To protect a VM with both Hyper-V host-level and file-level (agent-based) backups, ensure that the VM's host-level and file-level jobs do not overlap. Running both simultaneously may lead to undesirable results.