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

[Rubin Abdi]

Laurence Perkins (OE) wrote on 2014-07-22 09:52:
> My attempts to reply to the list don't seem to be getting through, so
> I'll send you my best guess as to the problem directly and you can
> forward it on to the list if I am correct.

Maybe the list admin is around and will see this.

> Duplicity only backs up changed parts of the file, but must scan the
> entire file to determine which parts have changed.  If your .VDIs for
> your VMs are large, this will take a while.  Try snapshotting the VMs.
> This will cause all changes to the disks to be written to a separate,
> potentially much smaller file.  If you snapshot after each incremental,
> then all the changes for the VM will be in their own, small file that
> duplicity can just pick up and add to the archive without having to scan
> the big, unchanged root VDI.

Thanks to both you and Edgar for pointing that out. I had no idea.
That's kind of awesome. It now makes sense that the slow down is simply
from Duplicity having to deal with scanning a large file in order to
find diffs.

> Then, before running your next full backup, merge all the snapshots back
> into the main image.

I'll try using Virtualbox with snapshots and see how that goes. I've
only been using Duplicity for a month. How often should I do a full
backup if I'm running it for my whole laptop?

Thanks!

-- 
Rubin
address@hidden

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