Backing up VMs

Nearly all of our development server environments are virtualized. One of the things VM technology provides us is the ease of maintenance. We use free VMWare server products, so we have to call for ourselves the maintenance responsibility. And for backup, we are using a script we found on the net that pauses the VM, copies the image and finally resumes it.

A colleague of mine, Sérgio Caliça, just proposed a smarter solution: why not use Shadow Copy?

Shadow copy as the following pros:

• works on opened files;
• is checkpointed (at least, I hope it is);
  
• doesn't have downtime;
• is fast;
• it's the simplest of the disaster recovery methods;
  

As cons:

• when the VM is recovered, it will probably act like someone as pulled the plug - so what?
• we haven't test it yet;

I'll give it a try one of this days and let you tell how it run. Thanks for the tip, Sérgio.