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

[Jarl Friis]

Mat <mat at olitec.ca> writes:

> This may be of use, although the author does state that it is a work in 
> progress.
> http://wiki.centos.org/HowTos/BackupKVMGuest
>
> Backing up a live virtual machine seems like a pretty logical thing, I'm 
> somewhat surprised that what seems like a work-around with LVM is the 
> best way to accomplish this.

It is not the best way, it is error-prone, a live guest system
consists of more than what is found on the virtual disk. As Etienne
Goyer mentioned this approach will most likely fail (to recover) when
guests contains running databases.

Expecting LVM snapshots to be sufficient for making a backup of a
running guest is like expecting powering of the machine (the hard way)
will not rsult in data-loss. Because in both situations, data on disk
is all what you have. You will lose disk-writes that has not been
synced yet, and of course the machine state (which may be less important)

I will not hope inCharge uses this method for taking backup of
customers virtual machines.

Unfortunately there is no email. I would have notified Julian about
this problem.

Jarl