On 31.03.21 14:41, Nicolas Kovacs wrote: > Hi, > > Up until recently I've hosted all my stuff (web & mail) on a handful of bare > metal servers. Web applications (WordPress, OwnCloud, Dolibarr, GEPI, > Roundcube) as well as mail and a few other things were hosted mostly on one big > machine. > > Backups for this setup were done using Rsnapshot, a nifty utility that combines > Rsync over SSH and hard links to make incremental backups. > > This approach has become problematic, for several reasons. First, web > applications have increasingly specific and sometimes mutually exclusive > requirements. And second, last month I had a server crash, and even though I > had backups for everything, this meant quite some offline time. > > So I've opted to go for KVM-based solutions, with everything split up over a > series of KVM guests. I wrapped my head around KVM, played around with it (a > lot) and now I'm more or less ready to go. > > One detail is nagging me though: backups. > > Let's say I have one VM that handles only DNS (base installation + BIND) and > one other VM that handles mail (base installation + Postfix + Dovecot). > > Under the hood that's two QCOW2 images stored in /var/lib/libvirt/images. > > With the old "bare metal" approach I could perform remote backups using Rsync, > so only the difference between two backups would get transferred over the > network. Now with KVM images it looks like every day I have to transfer the > whole image again. As soon as some images have lots of data on them (say, 100 > GB for a small OwnCloud server), this quickly becomes unmanageable. > > I googled around quite some time for "KVM backup best practices" and was a bit > puzzled to find many folks asking the same question and no real answer, at > least not without having to jump through burning loops. > > Any suggestions ? > As others pointed out - LVM would be a smart solution and BTW rsnapshot supports LVM snapshot backups. If you want a raw approach against the image file, then use a deduplication backup tool (block based backups). -- Leon