virtualbox.org

Hi,

I know the standard way to backup a Virtual Machine is to clone the hard drive but this is only possible on a VM which has been stopped. Is there any failsafe way of backing up a running VM?

The reason I ask is that most of my Virtual Machines are servers and I really don't want to boot-down and clone each one every evening (the process takes about 30 minutes all told and I can not have my servers offline for 30 minutes). I guess I am not the first to ask but I can not find any answer to the problem of backing up a running VM. Any pointers would be most appreciated.

Incidentally I have experimented with pausing the VM and just copying the vdi - this works but when you restart the machine with the copied vdi it is as though the machine had been improperly shut down thus relying on this as a method of backup is a bit shaky!

Thanks

Stuart

siloko1 wrote:Is there any failsafe way of backing up a running VM?

VirtualBox knows little or nothing about what is going on inside the virtual hardware it provides, so if you want a particular guest application on a particular guest OS to do a particular thing (like flush all its open files and get the OS to flush the disk too), then you really need software that runs inside the guest to trigger those things and then backs up to another virtual or network drive. That is the only failsafe way that I know of.