I highly recommend using GhettoVCB for this task. I usually back up my
entire VMs every 6 months (using GhettoVCB), and run BackupPC to backup the
data files on the filesystems always. I would not recommend backing up the
VMs using rsync directly. GhettoVCB can output sparse files and split the
backup VMDK into 2GB chunks. The nice thing is if you have a 30 GB VM, it
will just use up the actual amount of used disk space... I have some 30 GB
VMs that take only 5 min to backup!
On Mon, Dec 1, 2014 at 4:10 AM, Christian Völker <[email protected]> wrote:
> Hi Adam,
> > Given the size of the file seems to be part of the issue, along with the
> > remote end being the one to close the connection unexpectedly, can you
> try:
> > a) Use rsync (outside of backuppc) to transfer the file, preferably
> > using protocol 28.
> Worked fine so far I tested.
>
> > b) Check the logs on the client side, and enable debugging as needed, to
> > find out if there is any issue.
> No logs there- as rsync is not a default tool provided by VMware.
>
> >
> > Personally, I think you are somewhat crazy trying to do this for a few
> > reasons:
> I know i am crazy ;)
>
> > 1) You know the file content will change every day
> > 2) It will therefore consume the total (compressed if you enable
> > compression) size on the backuppc server for every full/incremental you
> keep
> This is something I did not have in mind, indeed! Then it really does
> not make much sense to perform the backup this way.
>
> > 3) There is little to no benefit in storing a disk image in backuppc
> There is as I want to have some (especially Windows VMs) backed up as
> images. for me Windows is so unreliable it takes me ages to get a
> Windows machine back to it's previous state when installing from scratch.
> > However, I regularly do the following with large files that need to
> > backed up, such as database dumps (backups), or disk images:
> > 1) in a pre-backup, I shutdown the VM
> > 2) split the disk image into a series of small files (between 10MB and
> > 100MB each)
> > 3) start the VM
> > 4) allow backuppc to backup the chunks
> Sounds like a very good idea. But I am having some issues in handling
> everything correctly.
> First, my large vmdk files are stored as "thin disks" which means they
> are sparse files. How do I handle them correctly?
> Just using "split" does not work as it creates full sized chunks then.
> Busybox-tar does not implement the "-S" for sparse file.
> rsync handles sparse files, but does not pipe them into split.
> cpio does not handle sparse files in copy-out mode.
> Any other tools known?
> Looks like I have to ignore the fact of handling sparse files and always
> transfer even zero data...
>
> >
> > Hope something in all that will help you.
> Yes, it makes perfectly sense, indeed. I will try if I can find a way to
> handle sparse files corretly. Otherwise I will treat them as normal files.
>
> Thanks!
>
>
> Christian
>
>
>
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--
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Director of Technology
St. John's Episcopal Parish Day School
www.stjohnseagles.org
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