XO Backup [NOBAK] for full backups

marcungeschikts

Done in XO Release 5.71 delivered in May, this year.

Internal Ref. only NOBAK support for all backup modes with snapshots

bnerickson

@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?

olivierlambert

Not sure to understand. The potential XAPI side improvement is to allow a VM.snapshot command 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?

marcungeschikts

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

benjamreis created this issue in xapi-project/xen-api

closed [Feature proposal] Ignore some VDIs when snapshoting a VM #4551

bnerickson

@marcungeschikts Thanks, that's perfect!

MichaelCropper

@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

murarkavast

Does the [NOBAK] need to be in the "Name" or "Description" section? This is not really mentioned anywhere.

Thanks

olivierlambert

It is in the official doc: https://xen-orchestra.com/docs/backups.html#exclude-disks

just edit the VM disk name

markhewitt1978

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.

olivierlambert

See https://xcp-ng.org/blog/2022/11/18/xcp-ng-8-3-alpha/#-vm-snapshot-with-disk-exclusion

It'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

dave.opc

@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?

olivierlambert

Hmm I'm not sure about this but worth asking @florent

florent

@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

dave.opc

@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.

florent

@dave.opc that's it

keep us updated on this