I'm having a problem with version 1.7 and windows backup file size

  • Thread starter Thread starter wired
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wired

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Recently started using proxmox. I'm running proxmox 1.7 and would like to reduce the size of my windows VM backups. My test windows VM is 675GB (server 2003) and currently only has 10 GB used. When it is backed up the file size if over 600GB regardless if I compress the backup or not. My 925GB VM (Fedora 14) backup size is only what contains data (17GB). Is there a way to backup only the portion of the windows VM that contains data?
 
wired said:
... Is there a way to backup only the portion of the windows VM that contains data?
Click to expand...
No - thats not possible.

I use normaly a "normal" size disk for the system and one (or more) big disks for data, which will not be backuped from proxmox (backup=no in the config-file).
Every night i run a backup-job inside the guest with bacula.

If something goes wrong, i can fast rebuild the VM from the proxmox-backup. Create the missing disk and recover the data from bacula.

Udo
 
Hi wired,

before you start the backup you should zero out any unused space on your virtual disks. One exception would be if you are using raw-files which already contains sparse areas. For Windows I use precompact.exe (SDelete should work, too). Then in Proxmox backup this can handled as sparse area in the backup file.

For backing up only single partitions or volumes you have to use another backup solution. I made good results with simple backup script and "storeBackup". And if you have only one partition per volume you could use different crontab entries per volume.
http://forum.proxmox.com/threads/44...d-configuration-for-backups?p=35171#post35171

For accessing one of multiple partitions on the host you could use kpartx after creating the snapshot (I only tested this with loop devices of raw files):
http://www.centos.org/docs/5/html/Virtualization-en-US/ch-virt-accessing-data.html

I assumed you are using LVM ;)

esco
 
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