Re: Virtual Machines: Newbie / novice questions

[deloptes <deloptes@gmail.com>]

Mark Fletcher wrote:

> I may be wrong but I don't think snapshots can be scheduled, but rather
> must be initiated -- so not really suitable for an automated backup
> solution. And as the conventional wisdom goes, if a backup isn't
> automated, you're not doing a backup.
> 

Yes for VM it is possible only if you use ESX server and licensed VM Ware
not the VM Player, but honestly if you do not change anything in the VM,
why would you need a backup. I would design the backup to pull everything
that is placed in a specific directory and is fresher as 1 day. When you
need to backup a VM, pull a snap shot into this directory and it will be in
the backup. A Win 7 VM has about 60G ... I don't know how you guys backup,
but space at private level is not that cheep.

> Maybe you could use a scheduled vboxmanage command to do the snapshot, I
> suppose. But what happens to concurent changes the guest makes to itself
> while it is being snapshotted -- the snapshot presumably takes a finite
> amount of time?

This is solved by the client. The VM or VBox will first do the snapshot and
than propagate the changes done during the time of the snapshot.
No need to worry about this.

regards