decent vbox backup plan

[fourchette]

hi there,

first of all, thanks for VB, it is such a great tool.

my setup
* running VirtualBox 3.2.0 on windows XP 64 as host
* about 8 or 9 different versions of Windows as guests, each machine has about 40 snapshots or so
* we rarely load 2 virtual machines at the same time
* we use this system to ease support (our main activity), so the value is not the data residing in the VM, but more on the dozens of different configurations we made with the snapshots over the months. it would take weeks of hard work to recreate them from scratch

all my VBOx data (vdi, snapshots, xml files) are located in a single directory, including VirtualBox.xml
about 350 Gbytes.

I want to build a decent backup plan for this. so we have started evaluating robocopy /MIR (a rsync for windows from microsoft) to mirror the content of that directory to a NAS for a later restoration.

i have seen many posts where people simply stopped using vbox snapshot altogether, mainly due to stability concerns and/or clone/backup issues. I have seen posts mentioning that the mirror approach wont work in all cases. even if you reinstall the very same VBOX version and make sure the fullpaths remain the same (same driver letters, etc.)

i want something that will safely restore my VBOX setup including all its VM and their snapshots

what are my backup plan options then ?

any clues ?

[mpack]

I have seen posts mentioning that the mirror approach wont work in all cases

In fact it should work in all cases. Provided you back up all related files, and restore them correctly in the event that you need to.

The problem is that users don't always back up all necessary files, or know how to restore them properly. They may for example have not noticed those snapshot files tucked away in that "Snapshots" folder, or they may not have realized that the contents of VirtualBox.xml was important too (at least prior to VBox v4). Also, while doing a complete restore is easy, it gets tricky if you only want to restore part of what you backed up, without affecting other VMs which are not (yet) damaged and don't need to be restored.

VirtualBox v4 made some of these things a lot easier: one folder tree contains everything of importance for one VM, making it easier to back up and restore that one VM without zapping everything else. Note however that this is only true for VMs created with v4, or which have since been adapted to the v4 folder and xml structure.

[fourchette]

I have seen posts mentioning that the mirror approach wont work in all cases

In fact it should work in all cases. Provided you back up all related files, and restore them correctly in the event that you need to.

The problem is that users don't always back up all necessary files, or know how to restore them properly. They may for example have not noticed those snapshot files tucked away in that "Snapshots" folder, or they may not have realized that the contents of VirtualBox.xml was important too (at least prior to VBox v4). Also, while doing a complete restore is easy, it gets tricky if you only want to restore part of what you backed up, without affecting other VMs which are not (yet) damaged and don't need to be restored.

indeed, we noticed that.
using VBOX_USER_HOME enrivonment variable and changing default directories in the settings helped keep all that data in the same directory for a later backup. We also noted that all files had to keep the very same structure (ex: dont restore on E:\virtualBox if files used to be on F:\VirtualBox because most xml files contain fullpaths...)

We also noticed that if you want to modify the virtualbox.xml, you hd to get it right in the first place because vbox will just screw it up if you made a single mistake. that led to xml plumbing nightmares and often terminated in completely lost vbox infrastructure. sometimes we managed to have a few VM saved, most of the time nothing.

however, back to the "should work" => i have come across posts in thie forum that claim in case you restore all that on a very different host system (ex: having a different CPU, but still CPU supported by VBOX), then restauration would just fail.
And of course, i cant know now the hardware i'll buy in é or 3 years once the current hardware will be replaced. But still, in case of disaster, assuming i install a fresh vbox 3.2.0 on this new hardware, i want the restauration to give me back the lastest backup

VirtualBox v4 made some of these things a lot easier: one folder tree contains everything of importance for one VM, making it easier to back up and restore that one VM without zapping everything else. Note however that this is only true for VMs created with v4, or which have since been adapted to the v4 folder and xml structure.

no more xml plumbing and simple backup ?

ok, now i want to upgrade
the problem is that i need a backup plan for 3.2.0 in case the upgrade to 4.0 miserably fails :'(

any idea ?