Hi,
first of all congratulation to version 7! I was happy to see the new features on the backup API side. Is there already an existing backup software solution that can make use of the new features (NBD, dirty map etc.)? Or do you know of backup projects that plan to integrate incus?
Thank you and best regards
I’m planning to integrate it into Bareos later this year.
FuturFusion is currently work with a few backup vendors around that for our customers, so we’re expecting to see support appear in a few solutions in the near future.
The APIs are designed to be pretty similar to what someone would be doing with VMware, so it should be easy to adopt. We’re also hoping that once we have a couple of backup vendors supporting Incus natively, others will follow suit just to keep parity with their competitors.
Veeam? 
I was very excited by the announcement for this feature btw! Did wonder how it worked with containers but haven’t had time to dig yet.
It doesn’t really help with containers, but for containers backup systems can use the SFTP API instead as a way to get access to the entire filesystem and be able to look at file modifcation timestamps and size to figure out what to include in their backup.
So for those it’s not a block backup but a filesystem one instead. The data in the SFTP API still effectively allows for incremental backups, just with file granularity rather than block.
Any update on this? Are some (commercial) solutions available in the meantime?
We’re hoping to see general availability of Incus VM backups in a commercial backup solution within the next two months, mostly waiting on QA and release at this stage.
But note that this will be a bit limited initially, VM only and while it can handle the generation of incremental backups, it won’t yet use the Incus dirty bitmap feature for block tracking, so backups will read through the whole thing…
At the Incus level, we have all the APIs needed for proper integration in backup systems, the NBD API and dirty bitmap tracking allows for full and incremental backups for VMs and block custom volumes, then the SFTP API can be used to get the file metadata needed for backups of container and filesystem custom volumes.
So it’s mostly a matter of adoption at this point. We’re hoping for a bit of a domino effect on this one where once we have a couple of solutions supporting Incus, the rest will follow suite just to not be behind on their list of supported platforms, but we’ll see.