Hello Mark, [Mark Pace, Freitag 07 Oktober 2011 06:30]: > Hello everyone. I've been following the development and have been > testing sheepdog in a limited environment. My key concerns (beyond > stability) revolve around offline/offsite backing up. I'd like to > achieve the following somehow, albeit with built in sheepdog > functions or functions that are pushed into qemu-img. > > 1. Offline backups: Right now sheepdog offers redundancy, but there > needs to be a way to store consistent offline backups. Being > able to have a node that stored complete copies of images that could > then be copied from that location would be ideal. For example, > could a special node would participate in the cluster as a mechanism > for making backups? You could go to this node and see the current > copy of each image (regardless of how many copies you configured, > this node would have complete copies of every stored virtual). You > could then use file system snapshotting to make copies of these > files for offline/offsite/cloud storage From my view it would be enough to get snapshots from the images, which can be copied to a backup media. The problem here is to get a *consitend* snapshop from the guest os view. This is the hard part. > 2. Images/snapshots to files: a mechanism to take a snapshot or a > regular image out of the sheepdog cluster to turn it into a file > for backup, to be sent to a customer, stored on a hard drive, etc. > This may already exist in qemu-img, but I don't know how easy it is > to take a snap and turn it into a full image. This is more of a one > off thing than the first point, but is necessary none-the-less. I > see that qcow2 images can be created from snapshots using a > relatively new (or a least the site I read claimed it was relatively > new) feature of the qemu-img convert functionality -- does sheepdog > also support this? At least from version 0.2.4, which is released yesterday, the collie command will give you the ability to read and write to sheepdog blockstorage. Backup: # collie vdi snapshot VolumeName -s BackupVolumeName # collie vdi read VolumeName -s BackupVolumeName > BackupFile will do the job. Frank. -- Frank Matthieß Mail f4m8at at googlemail.com G+ http://gplus.to/fmat |