VM backup leave snapshot ???

[thenetstriker]

I have now also created a support ticket for this issue to remind QNAP of this problem.

My suggestion would be to change this to a configurable incrementail/full backup concept. As an example the backup should e.g. just create a new snapshot every week and also just copy this snapshot to the backup drive. And then for instance every month a full backup should be created and all snapshots should be deleted before or after the full backup. This way the backup would use much less backup space and would also be much faster on incremental backups.

[Darko]

I created a ticket too and just got an answer of the german support team:
The behavior is known and the developer team is working on it. But they can't say anything about the schedule.
So keep waiting
I'm curious how long …

[DaRootler]

I created a ticket too and just got an answer of the german support team:
The behavior is known and the developer team is working on it. But they can't say anything about the schedule.
So keep waiting
I'm curious how long …

I am getting the same answer since one year...

Regards
Richard

[ktheking]

update from qnap support :

Fingerpointing ping pong has started. Now it's not qnap that"s the cuplrit , but it's the guys at Qemu that are to blame and to wait for.

https://launchpad.net/qemu
https://wiki.qemu.org/Main_Page

I kindly waived that off ,since clearly on the qnap website ,it's says Qnap is the maintainer of Virtualization Station.
There's not even a bug open at qemu for this issues ,so qnap didn't enter anything.
Guys , make sure qnap does not close your incident on this. If needed open up a new one if not solved.
Keeping on the pressure ...

[kommy]

Totally agree, this is QNAPs problem. Still having no luck with support as they wont even acknowledge the issue.
Does anyone have an alternative point of contact?

[ericvb]

Is there already a status update on this issue?

[CAP996]

Same here with latest Firmware installed. Will open a ticket too.

[jknight2]

So my question is simple - I have my image0.img and then 30 snapshot files (image0.1525574733 - image0.1543215608) So what can I delete safely without causing an issue with my working VM. In VMWare land, I need to "Delete" the snapshots and that command is actually consolidating all the snapshots back into the single image.

Just need to know the ramifications of deleting those snapshots, it works but it is a little strange how it handles the files. At first, I thought the growing number of files was part of the image, so it is actually ONE file for the image?

Not sure if this helps - but I have two QNAPs and I have started a remote restore - my assumption is that it will only pull over the single image and not the snapshots so I can delete the old files safely once I know it is working on the new one.

[ktheking]

@jknight2 : You can't delete snapshots without causing an issue with the working VM. It's best to delete the backups ,and stop creating new backups. After that you can delete the snapshots. I stopped using the scheduled vm backups until this is sorted. Do contact support if you're getting into problems. Make sure you take yourself a backup image from a livecd before fiddling with it ,because you might end up with a non working vm due the neverending consolidation time.

[kinkku]

Seems that bug is still there in the latest firmware. I was forced to disabled my scheduled backups because of this bug. I have also opened support ticket about this...

[chaplin1]

This is a really bad one ! My 6 GB Linux image is now taking Terabytes on my disks, every time I make a backup (which is once a day), QNAP makes a snapshot, my images are now all together over 50 GB and everytime growing. I cannot even delete snapshots because they seem to be part of the original image (if I delete one, the linux VM becomes inconsistent), This whole thing is nonsense and from what I read QNAP is not addressing the issue. Does anybody know how to reintegrate the snapshots into 1 image and how to reduce the image size. I have about 5 GB of data for a 50GB VM now.

[chaplin1]

This is a really bad one ! My 6 GB Linux image is now taking Terabytes on my disks, every time I make a backup (which is once a day), QNAP makes a snapshot, my images are now all together over 50 GB and everytime growing. I cannot even delete snapshots because they seem to be part of the original image (if I delete one, the linux VM becomes inconsistent), This whole thing is nonsense and from what I read QNAP is not addressing the issue. Does anybody know how to reintegrate the snapshots into 1 image and how to reduce the image size. I have about 5 GB of data for a 50GB VM now.

My only workaround for the moment is to use Export/Import of the VM, I am then able to reduce the VM Back to 4,7GB but that is all done manually

[otpfiste]

Today I had a really bad Sunday,

as backups leave snapshots, I had to do my homework: "Delete snapshots when nobody is working at the company for which I do IT support as external consultant". Result was a corrupted server not booting anymore because two of the snapshots I deleted in the Virtualization Station web interface failed with an exception (see attachment). I restored the entire server from the backup and tried again, this time I first shutdown the VM and deleted the snapshots one at the time from oldest to newest, it worked.

Big HINT when deleting left over snapshots from backups:

1. Shutdown VM
2. Delete the Snapshots in the Virtualization Station web interface one at the time, from oldest to newest
3. Restart VM

Hope this avoids that somebody else has a bad time like I had today!

[Inglebard]

Hi,

It seems to be fixed with the last update.

[kinkku]

Hi,

It seems to be fixed with the last update.

Indeed! Finally. Backup leave now only latest snapshot and remove other one(s). Not optimal but I can live with that.