How to make an .img backup of BVM and underlying OS

[Lightwel]

Hi

Loving BVM.

Having made a fairly complicated installation which also includes the Windows VM and some Windows programs making a total of about 28Gb, how can I back this up to avoid the time required to restore if required? The current installation is on USB (/dev/sda).

Priorities would be ;

1. Ease of restoration
2. Size of required destination USB drive
3. Size of backup image for storage

I guess rsync-based backup will not work because of the Windows file structure in the VM, so is dd necessary? If so, can I use dd count to limit the size of the image to fit on a potentially smaller target USB?

Would removing the .iso and the /unattended files make the re-installation from backup difficult?

Thoughts please?

Thanks
R

[Botspot]

The only file you really need to backup is disk.qcow2. Everything else is either no longer used after firstboot and windows installation (installer.iso, unattended), or is not going to be spontaneously corrupted on multiple re-runs. (bvm-config, gui-steps-complete)

In fact you can entirely DELETE installer.iso and the unattended folder at this point. This is mentioned in the bvm readme.

Regarding compressing disk.qcow2, unless you are a large enterprise with hundreds of these files, it's probably not worth your time to find a way to shrink them. If disk space is an issue, just compress it with the xz tool, to make disk.qcow2.xz.