Last updated on Monday 28th of February 2022 08:52:48 PM

©XSIBackup Classic

What happens with independent disks?

 Please note that this post is relative to old deprecated software ©XSIBackup-Classic. Some facts herein contained may still be applicable to more recent versions though.

For new instalations please use new ©XSIBackup which is far more advanced than ©XSIBackup-Classic.

Some of our users have reported that ©XSIBackup raises errors in the process of backing up VMs that have an independent disk or more. This behaviour is normal, we will change the error anyway by a warning in future versions to avoid too much alarm from part of the user.

As ©VMWare states at the time of attaching an independent disk, these will not be affected by snapshots, and thus if you try to make a hot backup to a VM that has at least one of these, an error will be raised at the time of accesing the .vmdk file, as it will be locked by the VM process.

I do I backup a VM with independent disks?

Simply do a cold backup by using the argument --backup-how=cold, this will turn off the VM before backing it up and thus the .vmdk files corresponding to the independent disks will be unlocked and free to be backed up.

What will happen if I still run a hot backup on a VM with an independent disk?

Unlike ©VSphere Client, that will prevent a VM with independent disks to be snapshoted, ©XSIBackup does take the snapshot to the VM in question. All the regular disks but the independent ones will be hot backed up and an error will be raised at the time to access them. Obviously this is not a good backup strategy, so do make sure to make a cold backup on this kind of VMs.

How do I backup mixed VMs, with and without independent disks?

Run two different backup processes, one for the regular VMs without independent disks and a second process for the VMs that have the independent disks attached. You should use the --snapshot=excludeMemory flag to avoid the independent disk being locked if you decide to exclude it from a given backup job. You could have two different lines in the xsibackup-cron file, one for each type of backup.