VPS to VHD

Need to back up your VPS that has little hard drive space to a VHD with the intention of hosting it internally?

Guess what – it’s not fun! Transferring data has to be done through the network, unless you have a second drive attached to the VPS that will handle what you need it do. You can back up to an attached Terminal Services drive, but it has some severe overhead and could take a week or more.

The best option I have found is to attach an Amazon S3 storage bucket. I used a piece of software called TNTdrive (https://tntdrive.com/)  that lets you mount your Amazon bucket directly to Windows as a mapped drive. The best part is, you can back up 50GB in about an hour depending on your host network and hardware speed.

The only issues I encountered were drive space – you need to make sure the available drive space is greater than the used space, as TNTdrive has to cache the information before uploading, in multipart, to Amazon S3.

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