The goal of this project is to add the ability to do full and incremental disk backups of a running VM. These backups will be transferred over a TCP connection to a backup server, and the virtual disk images will be reconstituted there. This project does not transfer the memory contents of the running VM, or the device states of emulated devices, i.e. livebackup is not VM suspend.
Livebackup different from the snapshot - only changes are transferred, it allows you to create incremental backups without the high cost of resources.
qemu is enhanced to maintain an in-memory dirty blocks bitmap for each virtual disk. A rudimentary network protocol for transferring the dirty blocks from qemu to another machine, possibly a dedicated backup server, is included. A new command line utility livebackup_client is developed. livebackup_client runs on the backup server, connects to qemu, transfers the dirty blocks, and updates or creates the backup version of all virtual disk images.
