How to make backups from VMs easily and efficient ?

[ullibelgie]

My Unraid Array is only one XFS-HDD and one Parity disk - so a small installation for a casual home user.

I have additionally a mirror of two btrfs NVMEs which I use for appdata/Dockers and also for the domain folder, which keeps the vdisks of VMs

 

While I find it easy to use the Unraid Plugin AppData backup for the Dockers' updata, how can I easily backup the very large vdisk files from VMs ?

Spaceinvader one shows how to make snapshots and replications based on the ZFS file system, but I am using btrfs and XFS... so what are the possibilities in that case ?

 

At the moment I find no other answer than just take regular copies of the vdisk files itself - which is hundreds of Gb and at least very time consuming. It cannot be automated and therefore in practice it is often forgotten, I fear....

Also when copying all the vdisk files, the server is very busy and it takes a long time - VMservice needs to be stopped ..... hopefully not forgotten.... etc, etc....

 

So I am searching for a better way to make regular backups from my btrfs domain folder with the VMs

 

To only for that issue change the whole server to a complete ZFS server, I am not ready to do that...... I am not an IT expert, which is what ZFS asks for, I think....

 

Thanks for some advice.

 

Ulli

[JorgeB]

56 minutes ago, ullibelgie said:

but I am using btrfs

If the vdisk in on btrfs you can also use snapshots and incremental replication to another volume.

[ullibelgie]

Hi Jorge,

How do I do this with btrfs?

Can you point me to a link, where this is explained to do with Unraid ?

 

Thank you

[ullibelgie]

1 hour ago, JorgeB said:

If the vdisk in on btrfs you can also use snapshots and incremental replication to another volume.

I guess, that btrfs offers snapshots and incremental replication to another volume ONLY IF the other volume is btrfs also ?!

 

But note, that my array is on xfs and external backup also xfs...

What can I do without reformatting my drives in Array and external backup drives ?

 

Thanks

[JorgeB]

1 hour ago, ullibelgie said:

Can you point me to a link, where this is explained to do with Unraid ?

https://forums.unraid.net/topic/51703-vm-faq/?do=findComment&comment=523800

 

58 minutes ago, ullibelgie said:

ONLY IF the other volume is btrfs also ?!

Correct.

 

59 minutes ago, ullibelgie said:

What can I do without reformatting my drives in Array and external backup drives ?

You cannot use snapshots, and there's no similar option for what you want, you can could use rasyn --inplace, but will probably be slower and there's won't be versioning.

[ullibelgie]

Jorge, thank you for info.

Then I probably wait for Unraid 7 coming out, as I feel, that Unraid is more and more developed for zfs use nowadays.

 

I feel, when Unraid 7 (stable) will be released and I upgrade to vers 7,  it is perhaps a good time to rebuild the array and reformat the pool into ZFS.

 

 

 

[JonathanM]

Another option is to treat the VM's like bare metal machines and back them up using traditional methods. I use UrBackup, it does full image and file backup, keeps the backups up to date automatically with no user intervention needed.

 

I have successfully restored full machines from scratch as well as recovered just a few needed files. Much more granular and flexible than vdisk image backups.