Re: [Duplicity-talk] Backing up desktop virtual machines?

[Rubin Abdi]

address@hidden wrote on 2014-07-21 01:51:
> how many GB's are we talking about. what's your OS?

My generic Windows 7 testing vm is around 25GB, multiply that by a few
and it adds up.

The host machine is Debian Sid amd64.

> incrementals do exactly that. make sure the virtual machine is
> paused/stopped to prevent file system (fs) corruption.

My understanding of incremental backups (which is what I believe I'm
doing) doesn't actually only upload the deltas of what's been updated
within a file. If a change is detected it'll just upload the whole file.
So if I boot into a Windows .vdi and immediately shut down the vm,
Duplicity through an incremental backup will reupload the whole 25GB
.vdi file, and not just the smaller inner bits of that file that's change.

Please correct me if my notion on how this works is wrong.

> possible, but different backup sets sounds a more natural approach.
> 
> however, if done via in/exclude duplicity would mask the source fs
> accordingly and the files would appear as "freshly" created in fulls
> and deleted in following incrementals (because missing in the source
> fs).

Ah, ok, I hadn't thought about that at all. That is annoying.

> try to find out the bottleneck in your vm backup first. is it the
> upload or the backup itself (test backup to local file:// target).
> knowing that you might be able to speed up things or in the worst
> case split backups.

I believe the issue simply is virtual machines are large, and I don't
need to back them up as frequently as everything else on this machine.

Thanks for your help!

-- 
Rubin
address@hidden

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