Foreword

Before backing up resources in OpenStack, it's important to understand the difference between three primary methods:

1. Intance Snapshots (Glance): These capture the entire virtual machine, including the operating system, applications, and configuration. Instance snapshots are useful for cloning VMs, creating templates, or disaster recovery scenarios. They're managed through the Glance service.
2. Volume Snapshots (Cinder): These are delta copies of the block storage volumes. Volume snapshots are not full copies and rely on the original volume for restoration, so they are mostly useful for accident recovery. They're managed through the Cinder service.
3. Volume Backups (Cinder): These are point-in-time copies of block storage volumes. Volume backups preserve the data within a volume and can be used to restore the volume to the exact state it was in when backed up. They're ideal for data recovery and are managed through the Cinder service.

Choose the appropriate method based on your recovery needs: instance snapshots for full system recovery or replication, volume snapshots for accident prevention and recovery or volume backups for full data recovery.

Backup VMs and volumes

Instance Snapshots

To take a snapshot of a instance for later recovery or replication, one must create an image based on the current VM.  The list of VMs/servers than can be used for the snapshot can be found with:

openstack server list

And, to create the image snapshot of a running VM with name or id <server> use the command

openstack server image create --name <image_name> <server>

where:

• --name <image_name>: The name for the new image snapshot
• <server>: The name of your server / VM.

Lastly, to see the list of images, including the recent snapshot

openstack image list

and the specific details of the created image
```
openstack image show <image_name>
```

Volume Backups

List available backups

To list all available backups in your cloud, you can use the following command:

openstack volume backup list

Additionally, you can filter the results with additional options to list backups for a specific volume:

 openstack volume backup list --volume VOLUME_ID

Creating Backups

To create a backup of a volume:

openstack volume backup create [--incremental] [--force] [--name NAME] VOLUME

Where:

• --incremental: Create an incremental backup (requires a previous full backup)
• --force: Create a backup even if the volume is attached
• --name NAME: Specify a name for the backup
• VOLUME: The ID or name of the volume to back up