What is the best/recomended/official way to backup VMs

[Jarl Friis]

Thanks for the reply, but it would be more appropriate to reply to the
list...

Jarl

brent timothy saner <brent.saner at gmail.com> writes:

> Jarl Friis wrote:
>> I am having some virtual machiines on my ubuntu server 9.04-AMD64. The
>> machines are KVM, I aam using libvirt to manage them.
>> 
>> I wonder what is the recomende way to backup these machines.
>> 
>> Is it just to
>> virsh suspend
>> backup
>> virsh resume
>> 
>> Or are there any other documents/pages discussing this issue?
>> 
>> Jarl
>> 
>> 
>
>
> hey, jarl-
>
> this all depends on what /kind/ of backup you want. if you want
> versioned backups in regards to the files ON them, then an archiving
> backup system- something like boxbackup- running on a different VM or a
> different host altogether would be the way to go (and run the backup
> client daemon from inside the VM). this minimizes downtime, as the VM
> would not need to be down to make the backups.
>
> if, however, you want a bare metal image type backup (i.e. contingency
> in case it all hits the fan), then you can stop the vm and then copy the
> hard disk image (i'd also backup any associated configs/scripts) from
> the host (and i'd recomment tarballing and gzipping them).
>
> additionally, KVM supports something called "snapshotting" as i recall-
> i never delved very deeply into kvm so i may be mistaken, but i recall
> it supporting it with certain types of the virtual disk (i believe it
> does NOT work with the "raw" type. for anyone who knows better, please
> feel free to correct me).
> what snapshotting does is basically takes a photograph (or "snapshot"..
> pretty simple etymology, yeah? :) of the currently running system. i've
> NEVER tried restoring one of these, but i believe you need a running
> functional VM for it to be able to use it.
>
> so here's what my personal recommendation is, provided you have the
> appropriate resources available:
>
> BAREMETAL BACKUP: once a week
> ARCHIVING BACKUP: once daily
> SNAPSHOTS: hourly
>
> and you should be pretty much ready for anything that might happen, i think.
>
> assuming.. you know, your backups aren't corrupt and/or
> fire/theft/apocalypse/etc. :)
>
> hth

-- 
Jarl Friis
Gavia Technologies ApS
Omøgade 8, 2.sal
2100 København Ø.
Denmark
Phone:  +45 26 13 20 90
E-mail: jarl at gavia.dk
LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/jarlfriis