On 29/10/14 07:00, xpac wrote: > I have BackupPC up and running in our production environment, and so far I am > happy with it. The environment consists of Linux/Centos boxes exclusively, > however on one of the boxes a VM runs which is a Windows 2012 (web) server. > > Currently I have BackupPC set to simply backup the entire directory which > contains the .vmsd, .vmx, .vmdk, etc files. > > Is there a "better"/recommended/best practices way to do this that is > different than what I am currently doing?
You have two options, one is to backup the files within the VM, the other is to backup the image of the VM. The first is identical to using backuppc with a physical machine, and allows you to easily restore any single file from any backup. However, if like me, you suffer some disk corruption (eg, losing the first 21MB of the image), then a image backup would be really helpful. I do this like this: 1) shutdown the windows VM (or otherwise get the disk image in a consistent/static state 2) split the disk image into a series of 100MB "chunks" and save to another folder 3) startup the windows VM Let backuppc backup the "chunks" and ignore the original file. By splitting into 100MB chunks, you will find the majority have no changes, and those with changes don't kill performance due to small changes in large files. Also, rsync tends to use a lot less bandwidth this way, so if it is a remote host, even more important. You could in theory take a snapshot of the LV that the disk image sits on, mount the snapshot, then create the "chunks", and then umount/delete the snapshot, or any similar method, though a restore will produce an image of a "crashed" machine (like power failure crashed). Hope this gives you some ideas, let us know if you have any more specific questions. Regards, Adam -- Adam Goryachev Website Managers www.websitemanagers.com.au ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ _______________________________________________ BackupPC-users mailing list BackupPC-users@lists.sourceforge.net List: https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/backuppc-users Wiki: http://backuppc.wiki.sourceforge.net Project: http://backuppc.sourceforge.net/
