[bitfolk] Thoughts on disk-image-based backups

Hi, We had a customer ask about backups of images of their VM disk. This is not currently a service that we offer. It has some advantages, so it could be a service that we offer. The main advantage being: - High degree of confidence that the VM is just able to be one-click restored and is then bootable and working, as it's an exact image of the disk It does of course also have a heap of disadvantages such as: - Granularity of backup is "the entire disk". No way to pick and choose what is backed up except by putting things on different OS disks. - It's based off a disk snapshot so nothing in memory gets preserved; a restore event will be similar to a "boot after unexpected power cut" event to the restored VM. Though doing the snapshot while the VM is powered off for a few seconds would be an option. - This obviously uses a lot of disk space which we'd charge for at our archive storage rate: £0.40+VAT/50GB/month. If preferred this could go onto third party cloud storage but bear in mind that Amazon S3 is about 3 times the cost of BitFolk's archive storage. - Limited differential backups are possible though I'm yet to fully understand how well that works. All I can say right now is that a differential would use less, but I'm not sure really how much less. So, there would be "some charge" for the service itself and definitely a charge at archive storage rates for the actual amount of storage involved. If this sounds like a service that you think you'd actually want, please get in touch off-list and we'll see if we can develop it. As it's more the BitFolk way for customers to do this sort of thing themselves I don't really expect this to be widely desired, but I am working on it for one customer anyway so if I can make it more generally applicable then I will. Thanks, Andy -- https://bitfolk.com/ -- No-nonsense VPS hosting