I've been looking into doing offsite backups of running xen VMs. The
method being considered is making a snapshot of the VMs disk,
mounting this, and then rsyncing it to the backup server. This has of
course a number of issues with regards to consistency e.g. status of
database files etc. Some of these are easy to solve (in the case of
databases, doing some kind of dump before the snapshot is made, for
instance) but some are not so easy e.g. files which are being edited
just as the snapshot is taken.
One issue I have noticed is that of filesystem inconsistency, the
snapshot of course being at a lower level than the filesystem. TO
deal with this, I have been running fsck on the snapshot, which has
worked so far, but I guess it's only a matter of time before I get a
filesystem state which fsck can't automatically handle.
Have any of you looked at any of these issues?
Niall
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