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?
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.
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.