(Alternative to) Backups that include snapshots?

[Peter Valdemar Mørch]

Hi,

We understand that standard Proxmox backups do not include snapshots. Are there other ways to store the complete state of a VM, including snapshots?

We need them for two purposes:

• Disaster recovery
• Moving VMs from one cluster to another

Backups are handy for this, with the major drawback that they don't include historical snapshots, so after disaster recovery, users are upset that their snapshots have been lost, and rightly so, because they've lost data.

Is there any way we can "backup" and "restore" the entire VMs including snapshots? (I realize this may not actually be called "backup" in proxmox terminology)

Feel free to point me to documentation if that is relevant. Googling for "proxmox backup snaphots" gives lots of irrelevent hits, so it is possible the information is out there and I just can't find it.

Best regards,

Peter

 

[dcsapak]

not really,

first the disk snapshots are different for every storage subsystem (e.g. ceph, zfs, lvm-thin, qcow2) and we have no consistent way of saving them
also, snapshots can also contain other (old) disks (which i guess most do not want to include in a backup all the time)

but if you have a basic setup with directory or nfs storage you could copy a qcow2 file (which contains the snapshots) and the vm config (but do this only when the vm is off/suspended as you could get non-consistent data otherwise)

another approach would be to use zfs, with this you can (recursively) send the vm disks to another zfs storage (including snapshots)

 

[frank lupo]

For CEPH see https://github.com/EnterpriseVE/eve4pve-barc