Out of interest, when you backup your virtual machine images, do you stop/pause the VM? How does it cope with backing up files that are "in use" like a VM?
I thought someone might ask that
![wink wink](/images/graemlins/default_dark/wink.gif)
At the moment I'm not stopping/pausing them. I haven't had any problems yet and I have restored a couple of them.
My main dev VM is running pretty much 24/7, so it has lots of time when it is sat idle. I expect at that point all the guest OSes caches get flushed, so anything important gets written out.
I guess what I should be doing running script once a day to create a snapshot and then kick off and explicit CP run. But to be honest recovering the data in the lastest snapshot isn't really important, as long as I can restore a vaguely recent working copy of the VM so I don't have to rebuild it all when something goes wrong.
All my important data within the VM is backed up separately from CP running within the VM anyway
![wink wink](/images/graemlins/default_dark/wink.gif)
And the only data I really care about on it is source code, so the whole open file issues don't really apply.