Exclude directories during backup

[gschiltz]

Is there any way to exclude directories from being backed up by the built-in backup facilities? This would be very useful for backing up VMs that contain a large amount of data, especially if the data doesn't change much over time. An example would be a virtualized NAS server used to store archival video. The NAS itself might only be 1 GB in size, but might hold hundreds of GB of video. The server would occasionally be updated with software patches, so it would make sense to back it up, but it would make no sense to include the video files - it would make more sense to backup those files with regular backup software like Bacula.

Or, am I making a big, wrong assumption that the filesystems that hold the video files would be stored in the VM itself? Would it make more sense to have a directory managed directly by Proxmox, expose it via the virtio driver to the VM, and then mount the directory inside the VM? I've not actually tried this myself, but assume it could work.

Maybe then the better question is how best to manage storage in a virtualized environment - inside the VMs vs in Proxmox itself. Comments?

 

[gschiltz]

To partially answer my own question, I just realized that each virtual hard disk has the option as to whether or not to back it up. So, in my hypothetical case, I could install the OS on one virtual disk that gets backed up by Proxmox, and create a second virtual drive for the video files and choose to not back it up with Proxmox. The contents of the virtual HD could be backed up from within the VM using other conventional means, e.g. rsync, tar, Bacula, BackupPC, or whatever.

I would still be interested in how people handle these types of cases in the real world, as well as opinions about best practices.

 

[dietmar]

I guess there are countless different setups. We use a separate (physical) NFS server to store our data. We also store vzdump backups on that server, and run amanda to dump everything to tape.