virtualbox.org

I have some VM's running in my headless linux server... i access them via RDP and manage them via phpvirtuabox....
I must do some backups of the VM's just in case of fatal hardware problem. It took me months to configure some of the appliances of the virtual machines now running, and i wouldn't like to lose them.
The way i thought about doing the backup is just stop the virtual machine and copy the content of its respective folder somewhere else... but this process implies that i must stop the VM for a while, which i wouldn't want.....
Any suggestion' How do you people backup yours?

IMHO What you need to decide it just how important the backup is for you. If it is really important then a live backup is not as reliable as shutting down the guest and doing a full copy of the guest folder. There are several backup programs that will backup data live but backing up a running service is touchy/dicey at the best.
Now vbox4me2 has been using a package for a while that he swears by. He may be able to shed some light on this for you.

I know.... making a backup of a running machine is quite playing russian roulette.... if you take 10 minutes to copy a vdi image, who knows what has been changed inside of it since you started until you finished doing so...... that's why i currently do the shutdown and copy procedure....

I think the package VBox4Me2 has spoken about before is Windows only, using Windows volume shadow copy service to allow reliable live backups.

A volume shadow copy is a bit similar to VirtualBox snapshots. The idea is that you take a snapshot, after which the live system can continue writing to a difference image while your backup software backs up the (now frozen) snapshot image. When the backup process is complete the snapshot is deleted. VirtualBox has many of the necessary components, e.g. you can create and delete snapshots while the machine is running, and you can clone snapshots to create a stand alone backup. I don't know if you can clone a snapshot while the VM is running.

That said, IMHO snapshots are just far too unreliable - simply shutting down and copying is much better.

Ok, just to make sure there was no better procedure than stop+copy

Thanks!!!