Backing up an encrypted VM to the cloud

[seanthegeek]

Hi Everyone,

I'm learning about TrueNAS. I currently have a VM running in VirtualBox on a Windows system that has BitLocker enabled. To create an occasional encrypted backup, I shut the VM down, create a 7z archive of the disk and VM configuration file, encrypt the archive with GPG, then upload the encrypted archive to a cloud storage provider.

At first, I thought I could reduce my number of systems on my network by running the VM on a NAS, but after reading through the documentation, it looks like the whole zvol itself is used as a virtual disk, rather than storing a .vdi/.vmdk/.qcow2 disk image file inside the zvol? I could use rclone to back up encrypted copies of the actual files inside the zvol to a cloud storage provider, but that solution isn't very portable compared to a normal VM disk image, plus the compression feature of rclone is documented as experimental.

It sounds like I might be better off having TrueNAS for storing KVM or ESXi disk images that are used by a separate KVM or ESXi server for virtualization?

 

[Ericloewe]

You can use ZFS native encryption combined with encrypted send to accomplish this. You can do a full send every time to duplicate the old "create an archive and copy it over" setup, which feels a bit clunky, or you can replicate to a ZFS target and take advantage of incremental snapshots.

 

[seanthegeek]

What's encrypted send?

 

[seanthegeek]

Ah, found it. Neat. https://mtlynch.io/zfs-encrypted-backups/