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Comment by binwiederhier | Hacker News Reader

Since QEMU devs/maintainers are lurking, i just want to say thank you for a fantastic project.

I work for a company (Datto) that backs up Windows/Linux machines, which can then later be run as VMs for disaster recovery. Our product heavily relies on QEMU, and would be significantly harder to implement and maintain without it (believe me, it was built around VBox in the past). Thank you!

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I work for an MSP that uses Datto to back up lots of servers and saved our bacon after the Kaseya hack! (Ironic how they're buying you now.) And I remember when you were using VBox, QEMU is much improved. Having QEMU boot up the backed-up VM to a screenshot that you can just email to us really helps prove to auditors that yes, our backups are tested! Now just replace all the spinning hard disks in your data centers with NVMe so we can get decent performance. :)

I didn’t follow… Who’s buying what?

per Google:

https://www.kaseya.com/datto-to-be-acquired-by-kaseya (Apr 2022)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kaseya_VSA_ransomware_attack (Jul 2021)

In this case, I hope your company consider some donations to this wonderful project, good for your business down the road too.

That is a fantastic idea. We are a Silver sponsor for Let's Encrypt, so this is not entirely impossible that we'd donate to QEMU as well :-D I'll bring it up to the people who can make these calls.

How do you handle the missing drivers when it comes to running under the VM? Do you modify the backups, or do you opt for emulation with good old standard hardware instead?

Windows is.. Windows. Always pain with drivers there. Linux should be the easiest story, but since RHEL7 (and the derivatives from there), dracut has defaulted to "host-only" mode which leaves the initramfs so skinny and devoid of drivers not related to the host.

We have a process called Hardware Independent Restore (HIR), which injects drivers into Windows before booting it in the virtual environment. If you Google "datto HIR" you'll find some resources (e.g. https://help.datto.com/s/article/KB217259206), but it's obviously a lot of secret sauce, so I can't talk about the details.

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