What is everyone doing for backups of VMs at the moment? I saw that 6.13 / 7.0 may have snapshots built in... But in the interim, is there a good backup system that uses deltas?

Currently I've just been shutting down the VM and making a copy, but those are huge files and the number of VMs I have are growing and their importance to my operations is also increasing.

 

Thanks in advance for the advice!

UrBackup is what I use. Discussion here.

 

I like keeping my vms on a ZFS Zpool. I have a dataset "domains" then a dataset for each individual vm.
From there you can snapshot each directly from the zfs master plugin, or as i do automatically using sanoid. From here you can then use zfs replication to replicate the vms with snapshots to another Zpool.
This is very efficient and a great solution in my opinion. To make this easier I have made some scripts to automatically do this. If you are interested in doing this check out these 2 videos.
 

 

 

On 4/20/2024 at 6:59 PM, SpaceInvaderOne said:

I like keeping my vms on a ZFS Zpool. I have a dataset "domains" then a dataset for each individual vm.
From there you can snapshot each directly from the zfs master plugin, or as i do automatically using sanoid. From here you can then use zfs replication to replicate the vms with snapshots to another Zpool.
This is very efficient and a great solution in my opinion. To make this easier I have made some scripts to automatically do this. If you are interested in doing this check out these 2 videos.
 

 

 

Do we need to shut down VM before ZFS snapshotting ?