Virtual machine Backups

It is very important to have backups of your virtual machines. With the Cloud-Bricks backup system you can backup specific files or directories for one or more virtual disks. This system can't make a copy of an entire virtual machine to see that review the Cloning or Snapshots manuals.

A backup can be run manually or automatically at scheduled times.


Configuration backups

Go to Virtual Machines on the left menu, then choose the virtual machine and click on the Backup copy option.


Scheduling automatic backups

In the configuration window backups you can choose how and when to run the backup task.

  1. Number of backups to be kept stored.
  2. You can schedule the backup by day of the week or the month.
  3. The backup will run when it is scheduled.
  4. To add a file or directory to the backup, click here.
  5.     Save the configuration backup.
  6.     Button to cancel any changes.
  7.     List of files or folders configured to backup them.

Once changes have been saved, it is possible to manually run the backup. 

Directory backups are stored in .ISO format, and will be available for download or use in a virtual machine.

Add a file or directory to scheduled backup

When we are scheduling automatic backups, when clicking on the button Add path... you should choose the hard disk that contains the data to backup (See screenshot section Scheduling automatic backups).


Mount .ISO to a virtual machine

The backups are stored in .ISO format, and will be available for download or mount them on a virtual machine.




Download backup as .ISO

You can also download an .ISO backup file on your personal computer to review the files in it.

Windows mount .ISO

In Windows 7 and up, simply download the .iso file in any directory, right click on it and left click the "Mount option".

Linux mount .ISO


On Linux systems, we can easily mount the .ISO file system directory with the command console:

#mount -o loop backup.iso /mnt/disk

Mac mount .ISO

Mac systems simply download the .iso file in any directory, right click on it and use the Open with> DiskManagerMounter


Backups status

There are three status of a backup, this status can be displayed within the virtual machine options, click the Backup button. Or I entered the left menu to Storage> Backup System. The three status are:

Status
Description
OK
The backup was successful and you can use it.
IN PROGRESS
The backup is running.
ABORTED
The backup was canceled
FAILED
The backup fails for some reason, you can click on the backup to see why. Typically a backup fails because a disk space problem. In this case it may be useful to increase the storage space available for backups, by referring to the documentation on the System Backups.