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<font face="Calibri">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.<br>
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<ol>
<li>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</li>
<li>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?<br>
</li>
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I'd be happy to think further along these lines if someone hasn't
done so already.<br>
<br>
Thanks for the awesome project!<br>
<br>
<br>
Mark Pace
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