Introduction to backups

Xen Orchestra ships a complete, agentless backup engine for your whole infrastructure: nothing to install inside your VMs, everything managed from one place, from quick rolling snapshots to cross-site disaster recovery.

New to backups in XO? Start with these two:

Backup strategy guideWhich backup type for which need: design your protection plan before clicking anything.Backups in XO 6Follow backup health from the new dashboards: job status, per-VM protection, restore points.

Pick your backup type

• Rolling snapshots: scheduled snapshots kept on a rotation. No repository needed, instant restore points.
• Full backups: a complete export of the VM to a backup repository (BR), every time. Simple and self-contained.
• Incremental backups: after an initial full, only the changed blocks are sent. Fast, compact, deduplicable.
• Full replication (DR): a ready-to-boot copy of your VMs, kept up to date on another host or SR.
• Incremental replication (CR): the same standby copy, sending only the deltas.
• Mirror backups: replicate a whole backup repository to another one, the key to 3-2-1 strategies.
• Metadata backup: the XO configuration and pool metadata themselves, so the orchestrator is never your single point of failure.

tip

You don't have to pick VMs one by one: smart backup selects them dynamically by pool, tag or power state, so new VMs are protected automatically.

Going further

Features and settingsEncryption, schedules, smart backup, backup repositories, restore (including file-level), retention, health checks: the full reference.Backup proxiesOffload backup traffic to proxies, closer to your pools and repositories.Distributed backupsCombine proxies and mirrors for multi-site, resilient backup architectures.ImmutabilityMake your backup repositories tamper-proof against ransomware.Backup reportsGet notified after each run: email, XMPP and more.TroubleshootingInterrupted runs, full SRs, slow transfers: the usual suspects and their fixes.

tip

Sizing question? The retention calculator estimates how much storage a given schedule and retention will consume.

See it in action