backing up VirtualBox

[der.hans]

Am 19. Jun, 2009 schwätzte Joseph Sinclair so:

Sorry for the delayed response. Been barely keeping up with mtg plans.

> I assume you're using VDI disk images for the Virtual Machines.  If you're using write-through disks it gets a LOT harder.
>
> With VDI disks:
>
> VBoxManage snapshot <VMachine name or UUID> take backup-$(date +%Y%M%DT%H%m%s) --description "backup for $(date +'%Y-%M-%DT%H:%m:%s %z')"
>
> Then backup the newly created snapshot VDI file (along with any previous snapshots as well, of course; rsync is a great tool here).  Restoration requires ALL snapshots from first to last, so don't discard any VDI files.

Yeah, I think backups, snapshotting and cloning sucks with VirtualBox.

I'm thinking we'll have to make snapshots and clone them in order to
create another snapshot in order to get to it.

Is there a way to change the UUID in the snapshot vmi? I suppose I could
just try to change it with sed...  :)


> The most recent VDI is always the current running state, and you need to leave that one off the list, since it's generally not safe to use for backup and restore.
>
> This will correctly snapshot the state of a *running* VM and allow you to backup it's VDI file(s) for later restoration if needed.
> You can restore the VM by simply restoring the VDI file(s) for that machine, and starting it up.

But them I'm doing full image backups :(.

Looks like we'll be putting all our data on NFS anyway, so I really just
need to backup /etc/ and maybe /var/.

Some initial testing with etckeeper is looking good, so a git repo on the
nfs partition and a script to make sure /etc/ stays cleans will probably
take care of the former and anything in /var/ that I really care about.

Thanks for the response.

ciao,

der.hans
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