I took a step back and thought I could just stop the VM and do my backup with restic, but restic is giving me a ETA of 20 hours. But again that is not the solution as every day the vmdk files are seen by restic as brand new files (certainly due to creation date and inode). I tried to extract the ova/tgz file (which gives vmdk files) to benefit from dedup and speedup restic. So backing up this ova/tgz file is not a good solution, it wont benefit from deduplication. More, even its content differs from the previous due to gzip compression. Restic sees it as a brand new file, certainly cause its creation date is new. The problem is the tgz is created every day during the night. The whole process takes a tenth of minutes which I can afford. ova file (a tgz which content is everything you need to rebuild a VM) and reboot the machine. So I’m stopping the machine, export it as an. To get a consistent backup you have to stop (or pause) the virtual machine (that’s the case for both VirtualBox and VMWare).
I’ve learned from experience that backing up a virtual machine while it’s running is a non sens as the files inside the guest machine would be inconsistent, particularly MySQL or PostgreSQL databases. As it’s little team server it can afford being down a few minutes (even an hour) during the night. I’m trying to backup a guest Ubuntu server on VirtualBox hosted by a OS X.
