Full backups and powered off VMs

[alejandroed]

Hi All!

I’ve a very annoying behavior, when a VM is not running, every day it performs a full backup even if the VM is not powered up at any time and there is no changes inside. If some teams aleatory shutdown VMs for resource/power savings the backups take forever because dirty maps resides on RAM (isn’t it?).

Is there any way to avoid backups of turned off VMs or to avoid a second full if the VM has not turned on since last backup?

BR

 

[Dunuin]

Dirty-bitmaps need the VM running 24/7 without any reboots. As soon as you stop the VM the dirty-bitmaps can't be trusted anymore (there is no way to check if the virtual disks data got modified when QEMU isn't running) and are therefore intentionally dropped.

In theory you could program it in a way that stopped VMs will be handled as "no data changed" but the PVE staff doesn't like that, because a admin or whatever could still modify the virtual disks while the VM isn't running and that would then currupt all your existing backups.

 

[alejandroed]

Maybe PVE can check and compare the disk image last modified date and skip it if matches..

 

[Neobin]

• https://forum.proxmox.com/threads/dirty-new-bitmaps.81754
• https://bugzilla.proxmox.com/show_bug.cgi?id=3233
• https://bugzilla.proxmox.com/show_bug.cgi?id=3092