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I want to (or better have to) do Backups of my KVM Virtual Machine images. I have searched for days for a good Backup Soloution. I know amanda is a very good solution. It would be kinf if someone kenn tell me if the following is supported:

  1. Trigger the Creation of LVM Snapshot (by invoking a Shell Script that I will write for that purpose)
  2. Do a Differential/Delta Backup on my KVM LVM qcow2 sparse file. => I only want to copy the actually changed bits/bytes (=Delta Backup). And it has to support that the file to be backuped up is a sparse file. (Rsync seems to have some kind of problems in regard to this (if the file does not exist yet on the other side... Then it will create a full file, not a sparse file))
  3. Release the LVM Snapshot (By invoking a Script that I will write for that purpose)

It's strange, I have nowhere found any documentation about this fact when searching the internet. Zmanda (Commercial Edition) has support vom XEN VM Backup (but not for KVM as far as I can tell)...

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As I recall, amanda takes advantage of native backup utilities. If your native utilities (i.e., gnu tar) support sparse files, then amanda will as well. I'm not sure how gnu tar will handle differential backups on a qcow2 file, though... likely it will just copy the whole file. Usually these types of backup utilities act at the file level and the qcow2 file will look like a single file. It does support sparse files if you use the correct option, though.

Amanda does support a pre-backup script and a post-backup script.

Another option you might look at is running an incremental backup from inside the VM.

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