[Sheepdog] Backup/Images

[Mark Pace]

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
 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?

I'd be happy to think further along these lines if someone hasn't done
so already.

Thanks for the awesome project!


Mark Pace
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