backup KVM guest

[Mike Lovell]

On 02/14/2011 02:09 AM, Make Compile wrote:
> Hi guys,
> anyone here running on kvm virtualization? I'm looking a solution for backing up my kvm guest without LVM snapshot. coz I'm running it on a none lvm partition. What i did to backup is to go offline state and then do the old way command "cp" the image file to its destination media. Anyone here suggest a good strategy. Tnx

backing up a vm should be no different than backing up any other server. 
there are many alternatives for backing up a system. rsync to a remote 
host, bacula, amanda, crashplan, compilation of self built shell scripts.

how to do backups for vms was brought up several times over the several 
months i was on the xen-users mailing list. it seemed the general good 
advice is to do a backup from within the vm just like you would any 
other server. many wanted to use something like lvm snapshots to do full 
filesystem backups while the vm is running. the problem is that when you 
take the lvm snapshot, you are taking a snapshot of a currently mounted 
filesystem which may or may not have problems with it. it will work for 
vms that have a low volume of writes but something like a database would 
be a bad thing.

one backup strategy i saw at a previous job, and like, was to rsync / 
(excluding /dev, /proc, /sys, /tmp, etc) to a rsync server and then use 
hard links on the rsync server to create a rolling snapshots of what the 
filesystem looked like. i don't have access to the scripts and config 
for that backup system but this link describes something similar. 
http://www.mikerubel.org/computers/rsync_snapshots/

of course, there are many many other options depending on what you want 
to do. hope that helps.

mike