[2015] Incremental backups: Good things come in small packages! by John Snow

Full backups of large storage devices are expensive, slow, and waste a lot of space needlessly by copying sectors that have not changed over and over again. Incremental and differential backups are an oft requested feature in QEMU, and will help eliminate the redundant copying of backup data. This presentation will cover recent developments in related delta-backup technologies, covering incremental and differential backups, image fleecing, and dirty bitmap management. We will highlight how these features are accomplished using modifications to existing QMP primitives such as the 'drive-backup' and 'transaction' commands to unlock rich functionality within our existing APIs.

Vladimir Sementsov-Ogievskiy

Vladimir Sementsov-Ogievskiy is a postgraduate student of Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology. He have received a master's degree at Applied Mathematics and Physics in 2014 in the same institute, with scientific work about virtual machine testing. Now he deals with virtual machine backup for Qemu and Virtuozzo (Parallels Cloud Server). Vladimir works for two years in Paralles (now Odin) as a Jr. software developer. Vladimir lives in Moscow, Russia.

John Snow
QEMU Software Engineer, Red Hat

I'm a recent UMass Lowell CS graduate and a recent hire for Red Hat. I work for the virtualization team as a Software Engineer and have been working on AHCI device support for the Q35 chipset emulation, improving our qtest and iotest frameworks, and most recently incremental backup and image fleecing support through the QMP management interface.