On Fri, Oct 12, 2012 at 08:52:32AM +0200, Lukas Laukamp wrote: > I have a simple user question. I have a few LVM based KVM guests and > wan't to backup them to files. The simple and nasty way would be to > create a complete output file with dd, which wastes very much space. > So I would like to create a backup of the LVM to a file which only > locates the space which is used on the LVM. Would be create when the > output file would be something like a qcow2 file which could be also > simply startet with KVM. If the VM is not running you can use "qemu-img convert": qemu-img convert -f raw -O qcow2 /dev/vg/vm001 vm001-backup.qcow2 Note that cp(1) tries to make the destination file sparse (see the --sparse option in the man page). So you don't need to use qcow2, you can use cp(1) to copy the LVM volume to a raw file. It will not use disk space for zero regions. If the VM is running you need to use LVM snapshots or stop the VM temporarily so a crash-consistent backup can be taken. Stefan -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe kvm" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
