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Comment by thefz | Hacker News Reader

> The Qemu image is small enough (3.6G currently) that I can easily make backups and snapshots

Why? I can make snapshots and backups of multi-terabyte drives just as easily.

I doubt snapshots in your workflow are quite as easy and fast as:

  qemu-img create -f qcow2 -b base-image.qcow2 -F qcow2 snapshot.qcow2

This takes mere milliseconds. The great thing about this is that snapshots are chainable, so you can create snapshots based on snapshots, and easily go back and forth to boot whatever version you want. Each snapshot only takes up the space of the data written to it, so they're like layers in an OCI image.

The qcow2 format is quite ingenious and one of my favorite things about working with QEMU. I wish its CLI would be simpler and more intuitive, so for more advanced scenarios I prefer working with libvirt/virt-manager/Proxmox.

Not the parent poster, but I have automatic incremental snapshots of my zfs datasets which also automatically sync to a NAS for backup.

For any drive size a diff is a diff, so if very few bytes change, very few bytes are going to be written regardless of the disk size.

This whole post is an exercise in futility

maybe there is a "size" as in how much storage he/she has. Or maybe bandwidth issues. I do not own a large NAS nor i have fast internet for uploads and stuff, so 3,6G is a god sent.

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