[Discuss] Cloud-backup solutions for Linux?

[blu at nedharvey.com (Edward Ned Harvey (blu))]

> From: Discuss [mailto:discuss-bounces+blu=nedharvey.com at blu.org] On
> Behalf Of Daniel Barrett
> 
> One piece I've never fully worked out is backing up the live VM's
> (VMware Workstation) running on my Linux box. 

For VM's, you only have three choices:

1- Install backup software or something in the guest, let the guest back itself up.
2- Use a snapshotting filesystem like btrfs or zfs in the host, so the host can replicate the guest storage to another location seamlessly.
or
3- Shutdown the guest, and then use some sort of "regular" copy method. Tar, cp, whatever. It's very difficult to do this in any sort of time or space efficiency, but it might be possible, and sometimes you have no other choice.

Y'know - or just don't backup the guest machine. If you do all your work in git or something, and you can easily rebuild the guest from scratch.