Hello:

On Tue, Oct 28, 2014 at 01:00:05PM -0700, xpac wrote:
> I have BackupPC up and running in our production environment, and so
> far I am happy with it.  The environment consists of Linux/Centos
> boxes exclusively, however on one of the boxes a VM runs which is a
> Windows 2012 (web) server.
> 
> Currently I have BackupPC set to simply backup the entire directory
> which contains the .vmsd, .vmx, .vmdk, etc files.

You don't say what method you are using, so I'll assume rsync, but
tar would also have a problem with the validity of the data.

Are you suspending the VM, before the backup and restarting it
afterward or in some other way making sure that the data on disk is
valid and not changing during the backup?

Have you tried restoring the backups a few times to validate that you
are getting something that is actually runnable and doesn't have disk
errors on restart?
 
Also rsync in backuppc doesn't do well with large files with few
changes. IIRC this presents as excess memory use and long runtimes,
but somebody else probably remembers better than I do.

> Is there a "better"/recommended/best practices way to do this that
> is different than what I am currently doing?

Most people run rsync or samba (smb) backups directly on the windows
box. With rsync (using cygwin) you can use shadow volumes which are
supposed to provide a consistent snapshot in time of the disk state
from participating applications. Applications that are VSS (volume
shadow service) aware are supposed to flush data to disk before the
snapshot is taken. This should prevent inconsistent and corrupted data
on the disks that you are carefully backing up.

SMB backups can fail to back up in use files and IIRC depending on the
version of SMB you may not get a warning about this.

If you search the mailing list for windows, VSS and smb/samba you
should find a few threads.

-- 
                                -- rouilj

John Rouillard       System Administrator
Dyn Corporation      603-244-9084 (cell)

------------------------------------------------------------------------------
_______________________________________________
BackupPC-users mailing list
BackupPC-users AT lists.sourceforge DOT net
List:    https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/backuppc-users
Wiki:    http://backuppc.wiki.sourceforge.net
Project: http://backuppc.sourceforge.net/