Using Checkpoints as rollback points

Backing up physical servers and restoring them to previous points in time has always been a little bit tricky in the Windows Server world. When something goes wrong with a server, in most cases it is preferable to fix the issue, rather than to simply rollback to a previous version. If you do want to make the decision to roll back an operating system on a physical server, you are talking about creating downtime. This happens because, whether you are restoring a Windows Backup file, or if you are using some kind of imaging utility that takes a full picture of the hard drive during the backup and is capable of laying that entire image back down in the event of a recovery, you have to stop Windows from running in order to replace its files on the disk. So no matter which technology you have used to take the backup, you must take the server down at least temporarily while you accomplish the restore.

Hyper-V changes everything. When working with our VMs, we...