is it necessary to back up swap discs of VM server ?

[n_gaugain]

Hello !

I create a VM 2012 R2 on VMWare with 2 disks :

1 for the sytem.

1 for the swap.

Is it necessary to backup the swap ? what is the concéquence if we not backup it ?

Nicolas.

[Colin_Weaver · Accepted solution]

How are you going to excludes the vmdk from the AVVI backup?

Note: I recently tested a backup and restore whilst trying to use an undocumented/unsupported way to exclude a VMDK from a multi-vmdk VM and found that GRT would have issues but more importantly I could not restore the VM (as a VM) as even though it did not backup the extra vmdk, it did maintain the metadata for the config of the VM and then could not restore just because one of the volumes that made up the VM was missing. 

I guess you could do a traditonal agent backup of the VM and not an AVVI backup then you could elect not to backup the volume with the swap on (although the swap file itself would be excluded from the backup anyway) However if you did this you would lose the restore capabilities of AVVI.

[n_gaugain]

Ok thanks for your answer.

So I will backup them.