My vzdump wishlist - is it possible?

[IUA2008]

I'm not sure if this is the correct area to post but thought it worth mentioning my wishlist for future VZDump improvements. For us we are looking to move from a VMWare/Veeam environment to a Proxmox one, but ran into these limitations.

1) Differential backup to backup save space (especially for creating offsite backups)
2) Differential backup to save time by working off changed block list
2) Ability to restore individual files/databases/etc from the backup rather than restoring whole VM as copy

NB: I do note that a unsupported solution has been found as a plugin for item (1), but have not found solutions for others.


Has anyone else found enhancements to solve improvement solutions?

 

[mo_]

1+2 have been implemented in this... addon? http://www.ayufan.eu/projects/proxmox-ve-differential-backups/
theres a section further down that page explaining why this isnt upstream (i.e. in proxmox itself)

as for your second number 2 (): this kinda depends on your use case. but if you only need to restore 1 or 2 files a year at most (which seems reasonable), then you can simply mount various VM image formats (i.g. your full backup) using qemu-nbd and scp the file into the running VM. for this alone it may not be the worst idea to install qemu on your workstations so you have access to said qemu-nbd and qemu-img.

Access to the VMs file system from the host is something thats currently being worked on in KVM, so that angle might be available later down the road

 

[IUA2008]

Thanks mo_ for such a quick response. Yes, I'm still learning to count past 2

I thought Ayufan's solution did not use a change block list from any underlying filesystem as it still takes quite a bit of time to do backups. Perhaps I am wrong?

Thank you for suggestion for (3) - I will have to do some more reading.

 

[mo_]

no the differential backup thing mentioned doesnt use any filesystem feature, its more or less just a differential tar'ing based on last-modified timestamps. so yea I guess youre right, it doesnt actually fulfil your needs.

so. as of right now, youd probably have to use the differential tar backup for containers and qcow2's snapshots for your KVMs



...somebody fast forward us to 2030 so we can finally start using btrfs to solve all storage related problems ever