Hi Guys

As stated - if I stop a Qemu-KVM guest instance (e. g. shutdown -h now inside it and wait for the VM to close "naturally") and I then copy the qcow2 format disk image it runs on out of the host, is that a safe way to backup the VM??

E. g. my idea is to stop the VM, copy the .qcow2 virtual disk image elsewhere, then restart the VM.

If a disaster on physical hardware, simply reinstate / replace hardware and host OS, copy the qcow2 VM virtual disk image back, and start it up again using qemu-system-x86_64 vdisk.img?

Will this work? Also given that the qcow2 file is at the moment only 20GB in size but is set to "actually" be a 1.0TB file... can "sparse" qcow2 format Qemu-KVM VM files be safely backed up this way - by simply copying it while the relevant VM is in a shut down state with the idea to copy that file back in after a disaster and simply start it up again?

Thanks!

For interested parties - I went ahead and tested this. I stopped the KVM Qemu VM running off my disk image. Once it was safely stopped, I simply copied the file to another file. Then, as a test, I started the copy and it seemed to work fine...so I'm assuming as long as the VM is stopped, it is fine to copy the qcow2 file it runs off as a backup of the VM.

Thanks for the update. You had a different post on basically the same subject, kind of what I said.