Re: [CentOS-virt] About doing backups with kvm guests

[m...@johestephan.de]

Hi all,

just to add some ideas to lvm snapshots.

As far as I know ist there no need to dd the hole disk. It should fit if you
just make the lvm snap ant mount it to any device you want. So you could pack
the hole img and store it via bacula or something else. And you normally dont
need to shut down the system. The snapshot tooks a bit longer but should even do
it while the system is in use.

So just:

- take the snap
- mount it
- pack it

Dont hit me if i am not right :-)

Greetz Jörg___
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Re: [CentOS-virt] About doing backups with kvm guests

[Kenni Lund]

2009/12/16 m...@johestephan.de m...@johestephan.de:
 Hi all,

 As far as I know ist there no need to dd the hole disk. It should fit if you
 So just:

 - take the snap
 - mount it
 - pack it

Yep, but you'll not be able to restore it into a bootable system again
if you only backup the files. You could however, take a backup with dd
of the partitiontable+bootloader and then afterwards backup the files
of each partition.

On a restore you would then copy back the partitiontable+bootloader,
format the filesystems and copy the files back.

But comparing this hacky solution to just using qcow2 on top of a
Linux filsystem, the qcow2 solution seems much nicer :) Especially now
when the qcow2 performance has been highly optimized:
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Features/KVM_qcow2_Performance
https://rhn.redhat.com/errata/RHSA-2009-1659.html

Best Regards
Kenni Lund
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