@olivierlambert Merci!

Hi, I'm confused by different versions of documentation for XO, Xenserver etc. and concerned about the recoverability of XO backups of SQL and Exchange server VM's.

1. Does an XO backup with advanced option "normal snapshot" use VSS to provide application consistency? I.e. does it use vm-snapshot-with-quiesce or a normal vm-snapshot?
2. Some sources say the above only works with an additional installation step but it is unclear what that is, the one I found seems to be obsolete per: https://xen-orchestra.com/blog/xenserver-quiesce-snapshots/ If I do vssadmin List Providers the Citrix VSS does NOT appear.
3. https://xen-orchestra.com/docs/backups.html#consistent-backup says that quiesced backups (i.e. quiesced snapshots) are deprecated in favor of RAM-enabled backups. Much slower and larger. Is that the only or the best way to ensure apps can be restored without data corruption?
4. What IS the recommended snapshot method, to ensure backups taken by XO are 100% safe, notably in the case of complex Windows apps like SQL and Exchange?

@julien-f Excellent, thank you!

@normanghenderson Hi Julien, Happy New Year. Just touching base on this? I just made an attempt with xo-server 5.73.0 xo-web 5.76.0 and got the usual SR_OPERATION_NOT_SUPPORTED due to the large disk.

@julien-f Thanks very much. Let me know when there is something to test.

Here's another case in XCP-ng/Xen, which pre/post hooks for XO backups could be used to solve:

Any way to backup VM with USB attached?

There are many situations in which it would be desirable to shut down a VM before backup and start it up again afterwards, especially these cases in which a storage device or USB device needs to be detached or the backup won't run...

Just coming back to this: @olivierlambert
(1) what is the approximate timeframe for VDI.snapshot ?
(2) You said "we have indeed webhooks but for jobs, I wonder it might be trivial to get them for backup" - is that likely to happen soon?
I can't do the code but I can test...

Thanks @olivierlambert. Any thoughts on the pre / post backup scripts idea?

Hi, I have a 3.4 TB video repository (as 2 disks due to the 2 TB limit) on a NAS attached to the VM that runs Zoneminder. It isn't necessary nor possible to create backups of that data.

Looking at XO Backup, I find mention that a disk whose name starts [NOBAK] will be ignored in Delta backups. Does that work? Github comments from a year ago make me think that it's still a work in progress.

That's what I need except: it's also necessary to do Full backups periodically and I understand Xen doesn't have a mechanism to ignore a disk when taking a snapshot, therefore nor does XO. Fair enough but, what about in the case of Snapshot Mode Offline?

It should be easy to script the XE CLI to (1) shut down the VM (2) detach the unwanted disks (3) take the snapshot (4) attach the disks (5) start the VM. Would that be a way for XO Backup to ignore disks flagged [NOBAK] on a full backup? Presumably XO Backup is already doing steps 1,3, and 5 for Snapshot Mode Offline. Adding 2 and 4 might not be much work and wouldn't even require UI changes.

Alternatively if there were a way to supply scripts that would add a lot of flexibility to XO Backup: e.g. pre-backup, post-snapshot/pre-export, post-backup.

Thoughts? I'm not much of a programmer but I'm happy to test...

I found a solution:
xe template-param-set uuid=8d8bcde8-ebbd-1d0c-7086-58a08602cf02 is-a-template=false
But that shouldn't be necessary... XOA build 20200228 XCP-ng 8.1.0