[SOLVED] VM backup with pbs client without PVE

[Ivan Dimitrov]

The pbs client is available on different platforms and I was planning to use for KVM VM backups without PVE. But after checking how the PVE backups work it seems the vm backup magic is mainly in the vzdump script.
Besides backup the VMs images from qcow2 files, is there any there API for backing up VM? In other way - without PVE is the PBS backup client simple file based backup tool or does it have something extra?
Thanks.

 

[fabian]

the VM backups in PVE use multiple PVE-specific elements:
- vzdump binary/modules: handles all the locking, volume activation, VM power management, consistency-guaranteeing actions and issues the backup command
- libproxmox-backup-qemu0: rust library that interfaces Qemu code and our PBS client code, the Qemu binaries need to be linked with it to support PBS
- qemu itself: requires a few patches to support additional QMP commands and our whole backup mechanism

these are not trivial to map to arbitrary other KVM/Qemu-based hypervisors, so if you are using those, you can only backup the disk volumes (need to ensure consistency yourself!) as fixed index archive, or use file-based backups inside the VM (if they are Linux/Debian-based).

 

[Ivan Dimitrov]

Thanks a lot for detailed description.