Backup to .bin / .cfg files in a folder

[obrienmd]

Currently, recovering from backup can be extremely time consuming even if compression is not used, as untarring requires input/output of the entire archive.

Would it be possible to have a backup mode that, rather than tarring images and config files, places them in a folder instead?

 

[dietmar]

Would it be possible to have a backup mode that, rather than tarring images and config files, places them in a folder instead?

No, but untar is a fast operation, so this will not cause any slowness when you do an normal restore.

 

[obrienmd]

It is certainly faster than unpacking something with compression, but it can still take hours if you have many 100GB+ images in a VM, especially over a network.

To me, having immediate access to a backup for mounting to the vm would be much more convenient and give us peace of mind for restoration speed if ever needed.

 

[dietmar]

It is certainly faster than unpacking something with compression, but it can still take hours if you have many 100GB+ images in a VM, especially over a network.

No, it should be as fast as accessing the file directly - there is no overhead.

 

[obrienmd]

I don't think I'm explaining well

You're right in that tar has no overhead, so restoration is as fast as copying the file from one place to another. However, what I'm looking for is the ability to, rather than restore, simply turn off the vm and attach the backed up .bin straight out of backup, and turn the machine back on. This would avoid the copy entirely. I don't think there's a need to automate this, but certainly the option to store .bin / .cfg in a directory would be very useful for faster time to recovery.

Does this make more sense?

 

[dietmar]

Sorry, I do not understand that.

 

[e100]

You could likely do that by writing a script, one prerequisite is that you have some local storage large enough to store the copies.

the process would be something like:
qm suspend vmid
create snapshot
qm resume vmid
mount snapshot
copy vm disk files to other local storage
copy config files to other local storage
unmount snapshot
delete snapshot

Then if you need to startup using the backup copy, just make a vm config file that points to the backup disk copies instead of the original.

Just remember that a backup stored locally is not much of a backup. For example, I had a power surge once that fried the circuit boards on every disk in my PC once.