I know I should have tested this before starting something "production" in a vm, but I didn't really.  If someone could verify my process should work, while I setup a new machine to test on, that would be appreciated (or if you have a "faster" way).

 

[note: VM is running and I don't want to shutdown to do a backup]

I have my btrfs cache drive and a vm installed at

 

`/mnt/cache/domains/UbunutServer/vdisk1.img`

 

so in the vdisk directory I run the command

 

> cp --reflink vdisk1.img vdisk1.bk.img

 

Appears to work just as the FAQ says.  I then run:

> rsync --progress vdisk1.bk.img /mnt/user/BackupShare/userver-backup/

 

file appears to copy fine. Yay!??

 

I assume I can shutdown the VM and simply copy that file back from the backup share, rename to `vdisk1.img` and start up the VM and the VM will load back to the state i took the the `reflink` copy?

 

Thank you!

14 hours ago, marcusone1 said:

and start up the VM and the VM will load back to the state i took the the `reflink` copy?

Yes, but the VM will be in a crash consistent state, since it wasn't shutdown at the time of the backup.

3 hours ago, JorgeB said:

Yes, but the VM will be in a crash consistent state, since it wasn't shutdown at the time of the backup.

Thanks, but what does that mean? it doesn't work?
Does KVM not have any kind of live snapshot capability like Vmware?

13 minutes ago, marcusone1 said:

Thanks, but what does that mean?

It means to VM will start as if recovering from a crash/power loss.

30 minutes ago, JorgeB said:

It means to VM will start as if recovering from a crash/power loss.

Right... i figured that could be the case (i.e. files not written out to disk maybe lost/corrupted).  Thanks for verifiying.

I've found a number of places that talk about live snapshots, but have yet to find a good guide on it (specificlly for unraid ideally, but any kvm howto would be good); do you know of any?