Is there a better way to backup a VM?

[anika200]

I am using the syncthing plugin to backup everything to FreeNAS and it works great except for my Virtualbox VM image. It is so slow to go up to the FreeNAS server @ about
Download Rate 208 B/s (1.62 MiB)

Upload Rate 154 KiB/s (1.28 GiB).

Is there a better way to manage a 50 GB vdi file? It only changes (Data wise) every couple of weeks or maybe every couple days in my busy season and the data I do need to save is already exported and backup up again somewhere else before syncthing gets to it.

 

[dlavigne]

Did you find an alternate backup solution?

 

[anika200]

No I have not investigated it yet, I thought there would be some simple suggestions to follow up on but it was pretty quiet in here. :)

Backup the whole file seems to be the thing, I want to get to a solution where only changes are written even though it is vdi file. Seems doable to me but then again.

Edit: now that I have wrote it out it does seem unlikely.

Maybe rsync will be faster.

 

[wblock]

Maybe rsync will be faster.

Not likely. The most efficient way is to run a backup utility within the VM. This will be able to back up only used blocks, rather than the whole huge VM image. I have used Clonezilla with success, although I have not tried to automate it. The manual method requires booting the VM into Clonezilla, running the backup, then shutting down the VM.

 

[anika200]

The most efficient way is to run a backup utility within the VM.

I really am wondering why I had not figured this out, brilliant thanks. :)