XO Backup [NOBAK] for full backups
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Ping @julien-f
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Hey everyone,
[NOBAK]should work for all types of backup: Rolling Snaphost, Disaster Recovery, Continuous Replication, Full Backup and Delta Backup.Unfortunately, due to the way the snapshot process is implemented in XCP-ng, ignored VDIs will still be snapshotted before being deleted, which takes time and space unnecessarily, but we have discussed with the XCP-ng team and they are working on improving this
In the meantime, XO tries to work around this by temporary detaching these VDIs from the VM during the snapshot, but this only work when the VM is halted (see offline backup in the advanced settings of a backup job).
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Hi does the Backup job still create the Snapshot (and therefore required time and space) when not doing an offline backup or has this been improved by now ?
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@julien-f said in XO Backup [NOBAK] for full backups:
Hey everyone,
[NOBAK]should work for all types of backup: Rolling Snaphost, Disaster Recovery, Continuous Replication, Full Backup and Delta Backup.Unfortunately, due to the way the snapshot process is implemented in XCP-ng, ignored VDIs will still be snapshotted before being deleted, which takes time and space unnecessarily, but we have discussed with the XCP-ng team and they are working on improving this
In the meantime, XO tries to work around this by temporary detaching these VDIs from the VM during the snapshot, but this only work when the VM is halted (see offline backup in the advanced settings of a backup job).
Ironically enough in my case, the VM I have that has a passthrough disk attached to it (a VDI I would like to [NOBAK]) is the VM that is setup as the remote for the backup job in XOA. So shutting it down wouldn't exactly work
.That being said I'm sure I could implement a workaround, but is there a feature request or tracking ticket URL somewhere where I can track XCP-ng team's work on this issue?
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I don't remember the status about this. I'm adding @marcungeschikts so he can tell us where it is in the backlog, when he's back from holidays
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Done in XO Release 5.71 delivered in May, this year.Internal Ref. only NOBAK support for all backup modes with snapshots
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O olivierlambert marked this topic as a question on
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O olivierlambert has marked this topic as solved on
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@marcungeschikts I understand that this issue has been solved by halting a VM before taking the snapshot. Per this comment by @julien-f , "[...] but we have discussed with the XCP-ng team and they are working on improving this", is there an issue or feature request or ticket to track XCP-ng's work to improve the implementation so that halting a VM is no longer required?
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Not sure to understand. The potential XAPI side improvement is to allow a
VM.snapshotcommand to add extra parameters, excluding some disks.You don't need to halt a VM to make a snapshot, it's completely unrelated. Maybe I'm missing something?
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Hi @bnerickson ,
The xcp-ng part to Exclude VDI from snapshot has been done on XAPI project and can be seen in github https://github.com/xapi-project/xen-api/issues/4551 , but will be only embedded in xcp-ng 8.3 planned around 6 month (+/- 3).
For the XO part, [Backup] Use ignore_vdis param when snapshotting, I will see with the XO Team and Olivier to synchronize the delivery
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@marcungeschikts Thanks, that's perfect!
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@julien-f @marcungeschikts @olivierlambert
Commenting as I feel my recent error (https://xcp-ng.org/forum/post/53557) is somehow related to this thread reading through the comments and history.
cc. @Tristis-Oris
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Does the [NOBAK] need to be in the "Name" or "Description" section? This is not really mentioned anywhere.
Thanks
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It is in the official doc: https://xen-orchestra.com/docs/backups.html#exclude-disks
just edit the VM disk name
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Found this by googling. Is there any news on being able to exclude disks at the snapshot level?
I have a couple of big SQL server VMs that are too big to snapshot, but the OS disk is relatively small and the attached disks are backed up by a seperate process anyway. So literally just need the OS image backing up.
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See https://xcp-ng.org/blog/2022/11/18/xcp-ng-8-3-alpha/#
-vm-snapshot-with-disk-exclusionIt's already used/supported by Xen Orchestra. If you want it for production, you'll need to wait for XCP-ng 8.3 to be available
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@olivierlambert
Hi.
on VM i have 2 disks each 2Tb.
i created a continuous replication task with 96h timeout. It did take around 48 hours for full transfer but still ended with "task has been destroyed before completion".
can i mark 1 disk with [NOBAK] start a CR task so it copies only 1 disk. When this is finished i mark another disk with [NOBAK] and unmark the 1st one, so it makes a CR for second time and copies another disk. and when this is finished, i remove [NOBAK] completely so that both disks can be transfered delta? -
Hmm I'm not sure about this but worth asking @florent
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@dave.opc it should work . Add [NoBak] to one disk, transfer it, then remove the [NoBak] on the 2nd , restart the transfer => the first one will only transfer a delta , while the second disk will be transfered as full . If you put [NBak] on the first one for the second transfer, it will be handled as a disk deleted and will remove it on the replica
Note you will have the same issue if ( when ) you'll need to do a full backup later on, for example if there are any replication issue, or if you want to ensure your base copy is not corrupted later on
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@florent
i just need to transfer that vm to another host so disks will be transfered 1by1. then when both disks are on destination, i will shutdown original vm, make a final CR and start vm on new location
so mine was a bit incorrect. on 2nd transfer both disks should be without NOBAK. thank you. will try. -
@dave.opc that's it
keep us updated on this
