Backups and snapshots...

[Lantizia]

Hey a few questions about backups and snapshots...

1) Is it possible to get the backup process (for OpenVZ containers) to backup plain files without tar or gzip and perhaps do this via rsync so it only copies what has changed. This would certainly be a worthy option to include host-side as it keeps backups quick and hard disk rewrites low. I know I can (and do) do this guest-side or even host-side manually but I'm just pointing it out as worthy feature to add in to the GUI.

2) Is there a way of running a backup now (i.e. push a button) rather than having to set a time even if it's just a one off.

3) When I think "snapshots" I think of it the way VMware does it, at that moment it begins writing memory/disk to new files and the old files represent the old state. When your done experimenting you can very quickly revert to the original state... I haven't yet seen where this is in Proxmox VE but I thought that was part of the point of using LVM (as well as backing up files in use).

Thanks in advance

 

[Lantizia]

*bump*

Nothing in 4 weeks...

Any ideas to any of that?

To point 3 I realise the snapshot is taken using LVM... but does that snapshot the memory... will such an option be put in to proxmox to manage the snapshots?

 

[dietmar]

1) Is it possible to get the backup process (for OpenVZ containers) to backup plain files without tar or gzip and perhaps do this via rsync so it only copies what has changed. This would certainly be a worthy option to include host-side as it keeps backups quick and hard disk rewrites low. I know I can (and do) do this guest-side or even host-side manually but I'm just pointing it out as worthy feature to add in to the GUI.

no plan to implement that.

2) Is there a way of running a backup now (i.e. push a button) rather than having to set a time even if it's just a one off.

no, but thats a planned feature.

3) When I think "snapshots" I think of it the way VMware does it, at that moment it begins writing memory/disk to new files and the old files represent the old state. When your done experimenting you can very quickly revert to the original state... I haven't yet seen where this is in Proxmox VE but I thought that was part of the point of using LVM (as well as backing up files in use).

Full featured snapshot support only works with qcow2 - but we don't want to depend on the file format - so we will not implement that until we can remove that qcow2 dependency.

 

[m.ardito]

I heard of this

http://www.r1soft.com/tools/linux-hot-copy/

(which is not free software, btw, but free to have - never tried tough)

would a similar (free softeare) approach be the right - "fs independent" - one?

Marco

 

[Lantizia]

You don't need that... LVM provides all the snapshots you need.

But am I right in thinking dietmar... that you need a snapshot mode that works specifically with KVM? i.e. so that KVM can pause, manage snapshots, etc itself and Proxmox just be a GUI for that functionality?

 

[whinpo]

I've done a script to create snaps and full copy from a machine, in french, but I could translate if needed and of course paste it there if you want.

By the way we suffer from problems when deleting and creating snaps on Debian, there is a problem with mapper and LVM which causes the snaps not to be really deleted, and cause problems (the only viable solution I've found was to reboot the machine...)

I spoke about this problem in : http://forum.proxmox.com/threads/40...-problem-in-LVM2?p=23144&highlight=#post23144
this problem can even occur while doing backups

I'm back from holidays, I'm going to work again on this problem