KVM | Backup a Guest Virtual Machine
As a system admin, taking backup is the one of critical task to ensure you have required data to restore the services incase recover from a disaster. To backup a KVM guest , follow the steps below
Power off the guest VM , if it is running.
virsh shutdown guest-vm
Note – You can take backups when guest is running, but it can lead to a unhealthy backup image.
Take backup of the disk-image file. (default path is : /var/lib/libvirt/images)
cp -p /var/lib/libvirt/images/ guest-vm-image /path/to/backup/location
3. Take Backupo of configuration file.
cp -p /etc/libvirt/qemu/ guest-vm.xml /path/to/backup/location
If you have data which is not local , i.e. some NFS shares etc, take perform the backups as recommended by the vendor.
Watch the video for details :
