Backup Strategie and Infrastructure - Need working ideas

[MyKey0815]

Hello,

I using VBox on Ubuntu 14 on my homeserver. In VBox running 4 Guests (1x Windows, 3x Linux). For the Backup of my Files i using BackupPC. Its copy all changed files to a external storage.

Now I want to add the VBox files to my backup. But every day the complete files (>250GB) will be copied. The reason is that the image files are changed.

How can I reduce the datatransfer? How can I backup my Guest when the running? Did a 3rd Party solution is working for that?

Please let us start this thread to find a working solution of this often wanted feature

[scottgus1]

Virtualbox does not have a built-in way to back up running guests. The guest must be shut down, then the tutorial "Moving a VM" (viewtopic.php?f=35&t=55003) can be used, re-interpreted as "Backing Up a VM". The backups would be full backups, not incremental. If you use Rsync you could reduce the amount of data actually sent, if you pre-seed your backup destination first with a full backup.

An in-the-running-guest 3rd party solution is required to back up running guests.

[freejack]

I backup my host OS system and the VMs including their disk images not daily, as the system changes could be easily reapplied (mainly updates).

All data requiring daily backup resides on separate network shares, provided to my physical and virtual machines via NFS (for linux) or Samba (for Windows).

Using this separation its quite easy to automatize a differential backup.

For experiments in VMs which require a rollback I use Virtual Box Snapshots or non-persistent disk images, depending on the use case.