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VM incremental backup

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I use Acronis to backup my whole PC to several drives using an incremental scheme.

I also manually zip up my development VM (Centos on VirtualBox). I then transfer the zip files to several locations, including onto my phone, and onto OneDrive so I have an offsite location. Can't be too careful...

Anyway, I'd prefer to automate this nightly task, and considering the zip comes in at around 8gb and takes ages to upload to the cloud (I only have 8mbps upload), I'd like to use a method similar to the Acronis incremental scheme.

Is there a way for Acronis to do this automatically, including the ability to store the data in a location of my choice (ie. OneDrive)?

 

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Darren, welcome to these public User Forums.

You could try setting up an Acronis Files & Folders backup task using Incremental backups (all backups tasks have to start with an initial Full backup image), where you select only the folders & files for your VM, but how well this will work will really depend on how changes within those folders can be determined by ATI - this gets more complicated when you may be using such as EXT4 file system within the VM for a Linux virtual disk.

You would need to test how the above works when using a local backup destination to see if you would see smaller incremental files after the full backup.

It really depends on where you want to put the backup files and authentication.  Acronis doesn't work with other cloud tools.  However, there are some possibilities:

01).  If you  continue to make a .zip of the VM file manually, you could automate copying it to different locations like a NAS or another drive using a Windows scheduled task copy it with a .bat script or a specific tool like synctoy or even a local robocopy or xcopy script.

02). Instead of making a .zip of the VM, Acronis can be run from within the VM and those backups could be restored to any virtual disk again (just be careful of licensing with Windows - if you don't restore to the same VM, it may appear to Windows to be new hardware).  This could be nice because you can automate the backups and the creation of the Acronis .tibs to an external drive, NAS or the Acronis cloud.  Otherwise you may have to still replicate them with a script or use a sync tool.

03). Instead of making a backup from within the VM, you can use Acronis to backup the VM folder - need to do this while the VM is powered off though!  You can't backup VM files in use from your main computer or your results are likely to be spotty because of how VSS snapshotting works and will only capture "as is" the moment the backup is started.  Likewise, though, you may need to use a script or a sync tool if you want to make multiple copies of these backups.

Totally forgot about this (just turned emailing on so doesn't happen again)! Ok, I think the best bet is to make an automated task. I don't like the idea of running Acronis within the VM, and the VM data is basically a single file of 15gb (4.5gb 7z). No incremental changes there.   

Should have really thought about this before. I mean I'm a programmer for a living and have several tools I've written in C# that are constantly running for my daily workload, including automated tasks in the morning (loading and logging into terminals, VM loading etc). No big deal to add a task to close the VM, 7zip it, and then transfer to the OneDrive location.

Thanks for the ideas guys!