savevm will take disk snapshot also, then you can copy the snapshot out of disk image to another storage. I had posted two patches about it: http://lists.nongnu.org/archive/html/qemu-devel/2010-09/msg01662.html and http://lists.nongnu.org/archive/html/qemu-devel/2010-09/msg00655.html. FYI. BTW, if you just want to try taking online snapshot or bakcup snapshot on QCOW2, our CloudStack may fit your requirement (http://git.cloud.com/cloudstack-oss)
On Thu, Sep 23, 2010 at 1:31 PM, Benjamin Kormann <korm...@itm.tum.de> wrote: > Hi there, > > we've been using qemu for quite a while on different platforms and we'd like > to perform snapshots on running qemu machines and tar them onto a backup > server. > The qemu-img snapshot can only be applied to inactive qemu machines > (images), hence this is not applicable. The savevm command within the qemu > monitor saves the current cpu state, ram, device state and content of all > writable disks. After this command has ended the qemu machine is still > running and a backup (copy or tar of file) can potentially be initiated. > Since the machine is still up and running changes occur to the qemu image > and the final backup file might become corrupted if no snapshot > functionality is supported by the underlying filesystem. > Finally my question is: > How can I perform a backup of a system at runtime (at best without the need > of any filesystem snapshot)? > > Thank you very much in advance. > > Cheers, > > > - Benny > > > >
