Why Qemu incremental backup is not supported by Proxmox

T

tincboy

Renowned Member
Apr 13, 2010
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Please look at the cool feature in link below
http://wiki.qemu.org/Features/IncrementalBackup
In VmWare world there's so many incremental backup solutions while in Proxmox there's almost none, ( incremental backup should be fast too, while few implemented one are not )

Please someone from Proxmox developers explain why it's not implemented yet?
 
it would be nice if proxmox dumps were upgraded and fixed.
Common problem is that while making dump - inside VM is hanging 120 second timeout ..... (even on ssd) (that was on proxmox 3.2 - meaby 4.2 is fixed i didnt check)
 
this is already discussed in the pve-devel mailing list, read the archives if you want to know details.
 
tytanick said:
it would be nice if proxmox dumps were upgraded and fixed.
Common problem is that while making dump - inside VM is hanging 120 second timeout ..... (even on ssd) (that was on proxmox 3.2 - meaby 4.2 is fixed i didnt check)
Click to expand...
Please check your HW. We have between 40-50 PVE Servers out. And we didn't have such problem.

tincboy said:
I am ready to donate for this feature to be implemented in Proxmox,
Please let us know Tom ( or other Proxmox dev team ) if you want to add this feature to Proxmox
Click to expand...
I will donate too :)
 
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Awmusic12635 said:
while not official someone did implement something similar in a patch: https://ayufan.eu/projects/proxmox-ve-differential-backups/

can break when proxmox updates though
Click to expand...

It's not good, because it will compare the backup with live disk of server and make incremental backup, while the Qemu has dirty bitmap feature which will remove the compare part of incremental backup process, So with the patch you've mentioned an incremental backup will also take long time and make huge IO pressure on storage while the dirty bitmap way will be really quick and almost no interruption on server.

I personally think the path you've mentioned is not an option for everyday backup.
 
tincboy said:
It's not good, because it will compare the backup with live disk of server and make incremental backup, while the Qemu has dirty bitmap feature which will remove the compare part of incremental backup process, So with the patch you've mentioned an incremental backup will also take long time and make huge IO pressure on storage while the dirty bitmap way will be really quick and almost no interruption on server.

I personally think the path you've mentioned is not an option for everyday backup.
Click to expand...

yep and another not-so-good thing is this:

What about UPGRADE? (READ THIS)
This is important part. If you will ever want to upgrade your Proxmox installation (by apt-get dist-upgrade orapt-get upgrade) ALWAYS revert/uninstall patches. You will still be able to apply them afterwards.
 
I've asked in dev mailing list why they didn't implement it yet, but no one answered.
Other people who are in need of this feature or interested in it please ask in mailing list why it's not in road-map of Proxmox this way maybe they change their mind to implement this need of enterprise feature.
 
tincboy said:
I've asked in dev mailing list why they didn't implement it yet, but no one answered.
Other people who are in need of this feature or interested in it please ask in mailing list why it's not in road-map of Proxmox this way maybe they change their mind to implement this need of enterprise feature.
Click to expand...

Incremental backup is a huge topic and not as easy as many think. This topic was discussed in detail in the dev lists, but of course, it makes no sense to do the same again and again. read the archives.

And yes, as soon as our devs see a way for an implementation which is stable and fits into Proxmox VE, we will do it. But up to now, this is not the case.
 
I agree with Tom. It's not an must have. Better stable and working ;) We use for incremental backups: BackupPC and Backupassist. Both is working fine and depending on the situation.
 
I want to try the sample below but I cant run some commands
http://wiki.qemu.org/Features/Snapshots2
The commands that I've issue with are:
change -l drive-ide0 file=/var/lib/vz/images/101/tempdisk.img -> which lead the -l is not a device
merge_disk -> unknown command: 'merge_disk'
set_dirty -> unknown command: 'set_dirty'

Dear Tom or anyone in Proxmox team would you please let me know why those commands are not working and how can I get them working?

 
Why do you want to have an incremental backup? Backup speed is slower with Kamil's solution, much slower. If you only want to have smaller disk footprint, I'd strongly suggest to build a ZFS-backed backup server which extracts the vma files and uses ZFS's internal copy-on-write to do incremental, differential backups which are very small and can be transferred very efficiently to a off-site backup location.

We use this for almost two years now and it's great!
 
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