Best Way to Make Backups of VM Image Files


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I would like to make copies of my Virtual Machine .img files to my array in order to quickly recover from an accidental .img deletes. Some of my VM images are partitioned to use 400 GB but are only currently using around 50 GB. I am thinking that creating a RAR backup of the image file would be a pretty good idea to save space. Anyone else have any other ideas that I should consider?

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Hmmm, it would appear that the RAR program (to create rar archives) is shareware and will require a licence after 40 days. I suppose in addition to my orginal question I would like to know if unRAID has any sort of built in function to compress files? If not, is there a recommend compression program that is good and free?  :D

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Well creating tar files was much too slow. I decided to just convert my .img files to .qcow2 which greatly reduced the space. I can then decide later on if I want to convert them back to .img files if I need to put the original image back.

 

qemu-img convert -O qcow2 /mnt/vmdisk-2/vm_images/Windows.img /mnt/user/VM\ BACKUP/Windows.qcow2

 

qemu-img convert -O raw image-converted.qcow2 image-converted-from-qcow2.img

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