I am working on a task to be able to backup VM image volumes in another server and location, the problem is, I don't want to copy the whole image file each time I want to start a backup job, I want to backup the whole image only once and then backup incrementally each time I want to do a backup from a vm.
Is there anyway to do that? I don't want to use snapshots because when the number of snapshots increases, it will have an impact on volume performance.
If there is another way or if there is a way to use snapshots more efficient, please tell me.
I have tried volume snapshot locally, I want to know how to do it externally or any other sufficient ways to do incremental external backups.
ive been working on a project allowing you to create full and incremental or differential backups of libvirt/kvm based virtual machines. It works by using the latest features provided by the libvirt and qemu projects (changed block tracking). So if the libvirt/qemu versions you are using are supporting the features, you might want to give it a try:
https://github.com/abbbi/virtnbdbackup