Hello: On Tue, Oct 28, 2014 at 01:00:05PM -0700, xpac wrote: > I have BackupPC up and running in our production environment, and so > far I am happy with it. The environment consists of Linux/Centos > boxes exclusively, however on one of the boxes a VM runs which is a > Windows 2012 (web) server. > > Currently I have BackupPC set to simply backup the entire directory > which contains the .vmsd, .vmx, .vmdk, etc files.
You don't say what method you are using, so I'll assume rsync, but tar would also have a problem with the validity of the data. Are you suspending the VM, before the backup and restarting it afterward or in some other way making sure that the data on disk is valid and not changing during the backup? Have you tried restoring the backups a few times to validate that you are getting something that is actually runnable and doesn't have disk errors on restart? Also rsync in backuppc doesn't do well with large files with few changes. IIRC this presents as excess memory use and long runtimes, but somebody else probably remembers better than I do. > Is there a "better"/recommended/best practices way to do this that > is different than what I am currently doing? Most people run rsync or samba (smb) backups directly on the windows box. With rsync (using cygwin) you can use shadow volumes which are supposed to provide a consistent snapshot in time of the disk state from participating applications. Applications that are VSS (volume shadow service) aware are supposed to flush data to disk before the snapshot is taken. This should prevent inconsistent and corrupted data on the disks that you are carefully backing up. SMB backups can fail to back up in use files and IIRC depending on the version of SMB you may not get a warning about this. If you search the mailing list for windows, VSS and smb/samba you should find a few threads. -- -- rouilj John Rouillard System Administrator Dyn Corporation 603-244-9084 (cell) ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ _______________________________________________ BackupPC-users mailing list BackupPC-users@lists.sourceforge.net List: https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/backuppc-users Wiki: http://backuppc.wiki.sourceforge.net Project: http://backuppc.sourceforge.net/