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.
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).
Now we choose the partition that interests us.
Choose the directories and/or files to backup, and click on
the Add button.
You can also use the links to explore separate directories.
If adding a file or folder to the list of backups, and it does
not appear in the list, it is because the directory containing
it has been previously added and therefore makes no sense to add
twice the same files to the backup list.
The backups are stored in .ISO format, and will be available for
download or mount them on a virtual machine.
When you want to use files stored on a backup, you must click
on the option to Mount .ISO (blue CD icon).
A window showing all powered virtual machines appears.
You can use the backup in the original machine, where the copy
was made, or in any other machine.
Thanks to this, a backup can be a quick way to copy large
amounts of data between virtual machines.
The backup will be available in the DVD of the selected
virtual machine.
Click Continue button, and enter the virtual machine.
As shown in the example, the CD of the virtual machine now
contains the backup data.
On Linux systems it will be necessary to mount the CD in a
directory on the file system, see your operating system
documentation on how to perform this task, usually a simple
command like mount /dev/cdrom /mnt should work.
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.