[PVE-User] PBS Incremental and stopped VM's

[Arjen]

On Saturday, April 10th, 2021 at 15:36, Lindsay Mathieson <lindsay.mathieson at gmail.com> wrote:

> I'm guessing only running VM's (with dirty bitmap support) can be
>
> incrementally backed up?
>
> Might be nice if we could schedule backups for only running VM's

Just to be clear: PBS always makes a full backup. The resulting data is deduplicated (before sending it to the server), which almost always reduces the writes to the server. An administration of changed virtual disk blocks is kept for running VMs, which only reduces the reads from VMs that have not been restarted between backups. It data transfer over the network is the bottleneck, you will have most benefit from the former (less changes, less transfers). The latter only speeds up the backup due to less reads (of unchanged data) from disk.

best regards, Arjen