Hi Jim,
I think I was not able to make myself perfectly clear: I don't use virtual disk
images.
I use LVM-Volumes instead (you can think of them as partitions that are
presented as block devices to ma virtual machines).
One thing you stated about doing virtual disk image backups is that they're
huge. As soon as anything in the virtual machine changes, the complete image
needs to be stored again to keep the image backup in sync. That's what I want
to avoid by using LVM volumes: I can create a R/O snapshot of them and mount
them into the filesystem just like an external harddrive connected to the
system. From there I can do a file-based backups which is way more space
efficient.
As I don't have any experiences in restoring a virtual machine from a
file-based backup (I think of possible permission and special attribute
problems from the NTFS-filesystem/driver, missing boot-record etc.) I ask if
someone can tell me about that or if this is not a working backup solution at
all.
Thank you for your response,
Andreas Piening
Am 16.04.2012 um 02:56 schrieb Jim Kyle:
> On Sunday, April 15, 2012, at 7:37:20 PM, Andreas Piening wrote:
>
> =>> I need to be able to completely restore the system including the
> =>> virtual machines if the machine gets lost, or damaged to a
> =>> non-repairable state
>
> If you do a full backup of the host, including all the KVM configuration
> and VM files together with the virtual disk files themselves, then a full
> restore should automagically take care of the virtual machines. They would
> not need to be backed up separately. You should also be able to restore
> their data by simply restoring just the virtual disk files, included in the
> full host backup.
>
> I don't do this myself, though, to back up my VirtualBox virtual machines,
> because my backup media isn't large enough to handle full host backups.
> Instead, I simply copy the virtual disk files individually to one of
> several external drives. This has worked to give me full backup on the VMs
> on the few occasions that I've needed it.
>
> --
> Jim Kyle
> mailto: jim AT jimkyle DOT com
>
>
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