On 01/19/2017 9:41 AM, Les Mikesell wrote:
> On Thu, Jan 19, 2017 at 10:16 AM, John Spitzer <johned9999 AT comcast DOT 
> net> wrote:
>> Because:
>> 1. I have a dozen VMs, each of which would need a backup job. Much more
>> complicated backup setup.
>> 2. The VM would need to be running to backup,
> Note that a consistent backuppc copy will only happen if the VM is not
> running.   Also, at least with v3, backuppc will do an enormous amount
> of work to back up a slightly changed large file via rsync.  That is,
> it will uncompress and copy the whole original file while merging in
> the changed bits and recompressing the new version and storing a
> complete new copy.
You suggested:
"Why not just back up the files on the VMs instead?"
The VM needs to be running to do a file backup of the files on the VM as 
you suggest. The VMs aren't running when I backup the VM files from the 
host so consistency isn't a problem.
>
> Normally for windows you would need a base install to restore your
> backuppc backup over.  That is generally not difficult to arrange.
> Also you gain the storage efficiency of pooling all the duplicate
> files across the systems if you back up the individual systems rather
> than the whole image files.
I'm trading off storage space for ease of recovery if the host disk 
dies. That's the primary purpose of doing the backup this way.

Each VM has a unique environment and I have several OS versions (Win XP, 
Win 7, Win 10, Win Server 2012, Linux). I'd need a base install for each 
OS version. To recover from a host disk failure, I'd need to recreate 
each VM, and install this base, then (assuming it works) restore the 
BackupPC files. This way I just restore the VM files to the host and I'm 
good to go.

I may be wrong, but I don't think you can just restore OS files from 
BackupPC over the top of a base in Windows and have Windows work. In any 
case, I need to that for each VM.
>
> But isn't it much more interesting that I've seem to have found some
> kind of limit to Backup PC?
> I think you have found some limit in your network or setup.
>
If so, what is that limit and how can I workaround or fix it? If that's 
not possible, then BackupPC isn't the backup solution for me.

Never had this type problem when using Acronis on a Windows host.

This is all off topic. I'm going to continue to back up the VMs this way.

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