Failed Completed VM has auto protect snapshots

[logical.roger]

I have a VM that has auto protect turned on, and when I attempt a backup, I get the message

"Failed Completed VM has auto protect snapshots"

in the logs.

I thought the backup program would handle VM with snapshots, is there a parameter that needs to be changed in the backup setting to backup VM with snapshots

[wila]

Hello,

Thanks for using Vimalin.

You are correct that Vimalin supports snapshots.

Auto protect snapshots are special in that VMware Fusion determines when they are being taken and that -as far as I know- there is no way to temporarily disable auto protect snapshots from running.

The backup works fine as long as there was no auto protect snapshot while the backup process is running. In the case an auto protect snapshot is being taken when the backup runs, things get out of sync and there might be a danger that your backup does not work correctly. So while it might be OK, I cannot guarantee it is without adding a lot of extra checks for this particular case.

As such the current version of Vimalin errors on the safe side and shows an error instead of reporting an OK.

Hope this helps,
--
Wil

[logical.roger]

Wil,

if you attempt to snapshot while another snapshot is in progress, the manual snapshot fails, also if you an taking snapshot the auto snapshot waits. Could you use this logic to determine when it is safe to do a backup?

[wila]

Hi,

The problem is that the auto protect snapshot might happen while copying the file bundle that makes up the VM.
For a running VM, Vimalin actually does take a snapshot for being able to copy the files, then copies the files after which it will commit its own snapshot. If the autoprotect snapshot happens anywhere during the copying of the files, things get a bit different for the backup process.

Not saying it cannot be done, just had to exclude this particular scenario from being supported for this release.

--
Wil

[wila]

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