[Discuss] Cloud-backup solutions for Linux?

[bogstad at pobox.com (Bill Bogstad)]

On Sun, Sep 27, 2015 at 8:16 AM, Edward Ned Harvey (blu)
<blu at nedharvey.com> wrote:
>> 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.

I don't see how this can work in a way that would be useful.
Filesystem snapshots of your emulated disk images by the host OS may
give you a single point in time copy, but they don't guarantee that
the copy is in any way consistent.   Now if you are willing to
shutdown your guest and then take the snapshot it would work and
downtime of the guest OS would be minimal.   Or perhaps I'm
misunderstanding what you are suggesting.

Bill Bogstad