# What has the greatest impact on OpenVZ VPS suspend time during vzdump?



## ICPH (Nov 4, 2014)

Hi,

on an OpenVZ server there is tool vzdump to backup VMs

one can backup large VPS and it will be down maybe even seconds. It is true, but only in some cases..

I use 



> vzdump 777 *--mode suspend*


About vzdump modes:



> "stop" mode
> 
> 
> Stop the VM during backup. This results in a very long downtime.
> ...



i want to ask how to prevent big downtime during vzdump backup.

my downtime was 15 minutes when i backed up around 80Gb VM on 7200RPM HDD

What has the biggest impact on downtime period? some directory on a VM, so i can reduce its size?

As per description above, what about somehow doing not more rsnyc before suspension? I also remember that when i suspended manually some big VM it toook very long time to be done..


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## KuJoe (Nov 4, 2014)

Do an online backup with vzdump, no downtime at all.


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## MartinD (Nov 4, 2014)

Doing a dump to the same single hdd the vm is stored on won't be helping either.


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## rmlhhd (Nov 4, 2014)

KuJoe said:


> Do an online backup with vzdump, no downtime at all.


Exactly this...


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## ICPH (Nov 4, 2014)

thx, for advice, please can You kindly write an example on what you mean by "online backup with vzdump"?

If you mean "snapshot: Use LVM2 (no downtime, online)", 

How i can discover setup LVM if server has Raid 1 only?



> Filesystem            Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
> 
> /dev/md2              2.0T  150G  1.8T   8% /
> 
> ...


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## Geek (Nov 4, 2014)

See example #1 - https://openvz.org/Backup_of_a_running_container_with_vzdump


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