Quick background: after having the physical computer running my home networking stack fail a couple times, I wanted to run a VM so that I could still have DNS/file server/MYSQL/etc even if the hardware fails. And I wanted to have software backups in case an upgrade borks this (another problem I've had).

So, I want to make sure this is going to work correctly. Doing it live seems overly complicated what with LVM and all that. But that's OK, I already have a time it needs to be off - when upgrading the kernel. So I was figuring instead of a reboot, I'll shut it off for a minute or two and copy off a backup. The backup being the hard drive and the XML.

I started Googling and it turns out there's this whole sparse files thing to worry about.

I just want to make a backup that's going to work if something goes wrong either on the hardware or the OS.

What do I need to do? I've seen some stuff about needing to tar it up with the --sparse command or something.

This may help.
https://administratosphere.wordpress...t-why-and-how/

It certainly agrees with what I've seen when Googling around. Am I interpreting this and other sources correctly in that the only "bad" thing that can happen is that a cp or a backup will copy a full-sized file? No corruption or anything, just a larger file to backup/copy/etc? That's OK with me. My VM in question is only 10GB if completely full anyway.

I've created a bash script that I'll link to in a few minutes when I get home (as long as I remember to do so). On the plus side because the VM is mostly 0s, when I gzip it, it goes from 10GB to 700MB.

Here's my script:

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