On 5/28/19 4:31 PM, Mike Keehan wrote:
On Mon, 27 May 2019 12:45:15 -0700 (PDT)
Ivan Mitev <i...@maa.bz> wrote:
On Wednesday, 22 May 2019 01:03:44 UTC, qtpie wrote:
Chris Laprise:
On 12/09/2018 10:38 AM, Chris Laprise wrote:
'Sparsebak'
Fast Time Machine-like disk image backups for Qubes OS and Linux
LVM.
And of course, a link to the project :) ....
https://github.com/tasket/sparsebak
Have people been using Sparsebak? What are your experiences? I
havent been able to test it myself yet, And will it be submitted as
a package to Qubes?
I've been using sparsebak since the announcement - here's my
experience with it so far:
Before using sparsebak I used custom rsync scripts for frequent
incremental backup of the data in my VMs' private volumes. It was
quick and efficient and despite the many obvious drawbacks of that
approach it was a thousand times better than using
qvm-backup/-restore (those programs are so resource hungry that I
only ran them once or twice a year - the suggestion of leaving my
laptop on at night with a scheduled unattented backup task is a no go
for me).
Sparsebak was a huge improvement over both qvm-backup/-restore and my
custom script approach. Despite the alpha (beta?) status I haven't
run into a single problem and Chris has been very diligent in
replying to some usage questions I had. Since the announcement he has
improved the tool without breaking anything and he also implemented
deduplication which definitely saves disk space when backuping cloned
VMs (interestingly this also works pretty well cloned VMs that have
been heavily customized/updated compared to the original VM).
I currently backup 24 volumes (a mix of -root and -private volumes
from linux and windows VMs) with a total size of ~100GB, and I use my
laptop without any problem while sparsebak is running in the
background (incremental backups are fast anyway so even if it used a
bit more resources it would be for a short time).
Now, as Chris pointed out the only hassle is that you have to set up
an encrypted volume to encrypt your backups but it's a pretty easy
thing to do.
So, I recommend you give the tool a try, maybe in addition to using
qvm-backup every now and then until you're confident it's working
properly for your setup.
HI Ivan,
It seems to be working well for you. Can I ask if you have tried
restoring VMs? Is it possible to restore single files, or is it
whole VMs only? (I haven't tried it myself - still just using
Qubes builtin backup and restore).
Hi Mike,
I can't speak for Ivan's restore experiences, but wanted to chime in
regarding restore possibilities:
Receive/restore is whole-volume (or vm) only at this point. However,
there is an open issue for a fuse filesystem to access the data (and the
format isn't too different from others that already have a fuse
implementation).
FWIW, you're not limited to restoring to the original volume path if all
you want to do is check/view an older file version: The --save-to option
lets you restore a volume to any lv or file path.
There is also the near-term possibility of a differential restore that
would load only the (older versions of) blocks that changed since a
specified date-time, to quickly see an older version of the volume. The
process could be automated to open a file browser in a disposable VM,
allowing the user to easily access their 'back-in-time' files.
I should note: With the latest commit the program is very close to beta
release. At that point (within ~3 days) the name and file paths will
change. You may want to try the alpha now, or wait until I announce the
beta.
--
Chris Laprise, tas...@posteo.net
https://github.com/tasket
https://twitter.com/ttaskett
PGP: BEE2 20C5 356E 764A 73EB 4AB3 1DC4 D106 F07F 1886
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