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backup and restore KVM solutions
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backup and restore KVM solutions

Seems it's been too long since this question was properly addressed. RSync and RClone do a great job of syncing data but what about a good backup that you can restore from?

Currently I'm doing a DD dump to a compressed and encrypted file of everything except select home folders. Then backing that up off-site. But I feel this isn't the best solution.

What is everyone doing to backup their KVMs? How would you do a KVM migration from one host or location to another?

Comments

  • MikeAMikeA Member, Patron Provider

    dd works for me.

  • sureiamsureiam Member

    @MikeA said:
    dd works for me.

    Might be because I've actually never tried a recovery but feels so unlikely to be a fully successful recovery from a DD.

  • ulayerulayer Member, Host Rep
    edited May 2019

    Proxmox specific: vzdump snapshot with LZO compression then move them to a borgbackup repo on another server via SSH (all scripted of course). If we need to restore, can just pull down the snapshot from the borg repo to the local server and do a qmrestore of the snapshot.

  • donlidonli Member

    @sureiam said:

    @MikeA said:
    dd works for me.

    Might be because I've actually never tried a recovery but feels so unlikely to be a fully successful recovery from a DD.

    Way back in the day we used to use dd all the time for backups and for moving a filesystem to a different disk (from an unmounted filesystem, of course).

  • AnthonySmithAnthonySmith Member, Patron Provider

    Am I to assume you have actual host node level control or just as an end user of a KVM VPS as obviously that is 2 very different answers?

    Thanked by 1Falzo
  • williewillie Member

    Historically dump/restor. These days I just rsync my user directory and figure if the system partition gets trashed it's time to reinstall anyway. I install from an ansible playbook that's uniform across servers, with not much customization on any particular server.

    Thanked by 1skorous
  • aj_potcaj_potc Member
    edited May 2019

    Veeam, a company known more for their products to back up Windows-based virtual machines, makes a quite nice (and free) backup solution for Linux:

    https://www.veeam.com/linux-backup-free.html

    I've tested it out, and it seems to work just fine for bare metal restores.

    Thanked by 1donli
  • sureiamsureiam Member

    @AnthonySmith said:
    Am I to assume you have actual host node level control or just as an end user of a KVM VPS as obviously that is 2 very different answers?

    Talking end user KVM. Lets say someone wants to move their server from one location to another and doesn't feel like re-doing everything.

    @aj_potc said:
    Veeam, a company known more for their products to back up Windows-based virtual machines, makes a quite nice (and free) backup solution for Linux:

    https://www.veeam.com/linux-backup-free.html

    I've tested it out, and it seems to work just fine for bare metal restores.

    Veeam is indeed a good company. I'm wondering how a bare metal recovery would work with a KVM. Would you be able to upload the ISO perhaps? But then how would you access a remote share off the server?

    Image backup and restore - Would love a solution that could mount a cloud based service like Backblaze, AWS, Wasabi, OneDrive, etc. and pull + restore from a image done there. Also to be able to make an image either on the fly or by booting into the ISO.

    Of course there is an enterprise solution for this, but someone who's spending $50 a year on a VPS generally isn't going to want to spend big bucks on something like that.

  • aj_potcaj_potc Member

    @sureiam said:

    Veeam is indeed a good company. I'm wondering how a bare metal recovery would work with a KVM. Would you be able to upload the ISO perhaps? But then how would you access a remote share off the server?

    Yes, they provide a bootable ISO for the restoration. The restore process allows you to mount NFS or CIFS shares, from which you can restore your VM.

  • AnthonySmithAnthonySmith Member, Patron Provider

    sureiam said: Talking end user KVM. Lets say someone wants to move their server from one location to another and doesn't feel like re-doing everything.

    by far the most simple method is to boot the source and destination VPS in recovery mode and dd the disk image over ssh then.

  • BharatBBharatB Member, Patron Provider

    For kvm live backups I'm using QMP. For offline backups dd + gzip

    dd if='path/to/img' bs=24M | gzip -c > img.gz

    Ofc you can use ionice to throttle above

    For live backups its abit lengthy though

  • jsgjsg Member, Resident Benchmarker

    I've played around with quite some "smart" approaches - and quite sometimes found my nose bloody due to diverse subtleties and idiosyncrasies (like a rescue system offering - or not - this or that critical feature (or not even being available)).

    That's why I created my own system based on nothing in any way special, other than a omni-present bread and butter distro (say, debian), a certain ordering system and some scripts (again using only bread and butter very plain stuff available from linux 2.6 to OpenBSD).

    [Full stop. Once again CloudF&'*! pesters me with a "proof that you are no robot" overlay, making it all but impossible and very cumbersome to write my post. I've had enough of that, sorry, so I don't continue]

  • Tr33nTr33n Member

    Take a snapshot and backup it with borg. Works great for me, and saves a lot of diskspace compared to full backups.

    Thanked by 1ma2t
  • sureiamsureiam Member

    @AnthonySmith said:

    sureiam said: Talking end user KVM. Lets say someone wants to move their server from one location to another and doesn't feel like re-doing everything.

    by far the most simple method is to boot the source and destination VPS in recovery mode and dd the disk image over ssh then.

    I like that idea need to play around more with it.

  • @AnthonySmith said:

    sureiam said: Talking end user KVM. Lets say someone wants to move their server from one location to another and doesn't feel like re-doing everything.

    by far the most simple method is to boot the source and destination VPS in recovery mode and dd the disk image over ssh then.

    or go for rsync, when both VPS are booted in rescue mode. Really fast. You would have to adjust maybe some settings like fstab and network settings if providers differ...

  • @ulayer said:
    Proxmox specific: vzdump snapshot with LZO compression then move them to a borgbackup repo on another server via SSH (all scripted of course). If we need to restore, can just pull down the snapshot from the borg repo to the local server and do a qmrestore of the snapshot.

    qmrestore works great! do it

  • FAT32FAT32 Administrator, Deal Compiler Extraordinaire
    edited June 2019

    @FiroSolutions said:
    qmrestore works great! do it

    Err, can you make comments with efforts? Why is it great? Does saying "do it" helps?

  • ulayerulayer Member, Host Rep

    @FAT32 said:

    @FiroSolutions said:
    qmrestore works great! do it

    Err, can you make comments with efforts? Why is it great? Does saying "do it" helps?

    I'll speak for him :)

    It's great because it just works. Having the ability to snapshot VMs then restore them with a single command is way easier than restoring a bunch of files from your usual filesystem for example. It's a one and done kinda thing.

  • FAT32FAT32 Administrator, Deal Compiler Extraordinaire

    @ulayer said:
    It's great because it just works. Having the ability to snapshot VMs then restore them with a single command is way easier than restoring a bunch of files from your usual filesystem for example. It's a one and done kinda thing.

    Thanks for the explanations, the reason I ask this is because he just made more than 10 1-line comments in a short amount of time.

    Thanked by 1ulayer
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