[pQd]

environment: KVM VMs running on physical hardware managed by us.

we have a belt & suspenders approach:

* backups of selected files / database dumps [ via dedicated tools like mysqldump or pg_dumpall ] from within VMs

* backups of whole VMs

backups of whole VMs are done by creating snapshot files via virsh snapshot-create-as, rsync followed by virsh blockcommit. this provides crash-consistant images of the whole virtual disks. we zero-fill virtual disks before each backup.

all types of backups later go to borg backup[1] [ kopia[2] would be fine as well ] deduplicated, compressed repository.

this approach is wasteful in terms of bandwidth, backup size but gives us peace of mind - even if we miss to take file-level backup of some folder - we'll have it in the VM-level backups.

[1]: https://www.borgbackup.org/

[2]: https://kopia.io/