How to schedule "Live Snapshots" similarly to backups

[jsalas424]

PVE 6.2-15

I've been scheduling backups through the GUI in "Snapshot" mode but have noticed that the file sizes are appreciably larger than "Snapshots" through the individual VM's options. I realized that backups are formatted as VZDump files whereas the snapshots are raw disk images.

For example, my Nextcloud VM:
VZDump backup file = ~85GB, scheduled through nightly backups
raw Disk Image = ~ 6GB, taken with snapshot in the individual VM GUI

All my disks are qcow2 and I'm backing up either to a local NFS or directory.

Am I doing something wrong, or is there no way to schedule the smaller snapshots I'm looking for through the GUI?

Thanks!

 

[mmenaz]

Here "snapshot" is the MODE, not the storage. This means that it does not shutdown the VM before doing the backup, but it "freezes" it for the duration of the backup. It has nothing to do with the snapshots of the storage you can take, also remember that the backup does not have any of those snapshots (so if you delete and then restore the VM, you lose all your shapshots).
So to answer your general question, there is not "scheduled shapshots" (with n snapshots retention) mechanism in the GUI so far.
If you have ZFS storage, there are some scripts for "rolling snapshots", like pyznap and Sanoid (never tried them), but outside GUI

 

[jsalas424]

Here "snapshot" is the MODE, not the storage. This means that it does not shutdown the VM before doing the backup, but it "freezes" it for the duration of the backup. It has nothing to do with the snapshots of the storage you can take, also remember that the backup does not have any of those snapshots (so if you delete and then restore the VM, you lose all your shapshots).
So to answer your general question, there is not "scheduled shapshots" (with n snapshots retention) mechanism in the GUI so far.
If you have ZFS storage, there are some scripts for "rolling snapshots", like pyznap and Sanoid (never tried them), but outside GUI

I do have ZFS storage! Thanks for explaining snapshots mode, that's what I suspected from my experiments but wanted to confirm.

Its a shame that there isn't a scheduled snapshot mechanism in the GUI, any idea if there's one in the pipeline?