Warrentheo

Check out the options in that link, but since I have not had a chance yet to test my backups by making sure the reversing of the backup process remains functional I don't want to tell people what commands to use just yet (I am at the "Know just enough to be dangerous" portion of my self training)... But that link mentions almost every option you could hope for, and how effective it is... It also mentions that the rsync option this script defaults to is just about the worst option for sparse files though That said, a slow but guaranteed to work option might be the better choice for a mission critical backup file here... Your own situation will guide you...

This is already part of the script, which I discovered by accident... Just name the image file with anything other then .img at the end... (It already skips the backup of the .iso files this way) This is not a plugin, just a shell script... Either run it manually from the command line, or watch these videos: Backing up and restoring VMs in unRAID manually Backing up VMs in unRAID automatically

I like this script, but I had to modify my copy because I have used Virt-Manager to switch my VM to using the VirtIO-SCSI driver instead, this allows for the discard="unmap" option to be set on the storage, making it self-shrinking... This makes the files sparse, but makes the VM backup take way longer than needed with this script... I used the information found here: https://serverfault.com/questions/665335/what-is-fastest-way-to-copy-a-sparse-file-what-method-results-in-the-smallest-f to modify my copy of the script to run significantly faster... Perhaps this script could be modified to either detect the "unmap" option, or allow for a customizable switch setting to change the sparse file copy procedure..? Also an option to use some minimal inline compression on the backup? gZip or PigZip?