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Re: [Xen-users] Backups !

At 16:16 -0500 30/7/09, Paras pradhan wrote:
My Virtual machines resides on a GFS partition folder (e.g: /guests) .
I can not take LVM snapshot because CLVM is not yet supported for
snapshot. DD takes ages to create backups. What is the traditional
method to backup virtual machines.

does rdiff-backup make sense in my case?

I treat each VM as though it was a standalone device - and do the backup from inside it. Without a lot of effort you CANNOT make a clean, consistent, and practical backup of a VM from 'outside'. If you snapshot the underlying storage then you will have incomplete image of the filesystem as you will NOT capture any cached pending writes - a good journalling filesystem will reduce, but not eliminate, the problem. To get a consistent and current image of the filesystem would require you to freeze the VM and copy it's state alongside the storage image - but then the only way to restore would mean restoring the entire VM to the exact running state at that point in time. And of course, if you have any applications (particularly database type) then they will typically have their own caching as well.

The two tools I use are rsync and rdiff-backup

--
Simon Hobson

Visit http://www.magpiesnestpublishing.co.uk/ for books by acclaimed
author Gladys Hobson. Novels - poetry - short stories - ideal as
Christmas stocking fillers. Some available as e-books.

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