Backup and a personal virtual machine

Until a few weeks ago all the development I did was done on a desktop pc.

As the pc started to be old I decided to change my way of working , I will be using a VM for my development work.

• Step 1: I need enough space on the system that will run the VM. The system being my laptop :-), I added external USB SSD.

• Step 2: I converted my desktop to a VM (P2V)

• Step 3: connecting the USB SSD to my laptop and voila everything works fine.

Maybe it would be good to have not just a backup of my sources (as I had when doing all dev on my desktop pc), but also have a backup of the VM as such.

Looking at the options I have to do that....

• Option 1: backup the VM to the cloud; which looks like a good option, except that the VM is around 800Gb and I "only" have 38Mbps upload speed. This would mean that a backup would take over 2 days!! And for most cloud-backup tools doing an incremental on this type of files, is not really what they are good in.

• Option 2: backup the VM to a NAS on the LAN. On a 1Gb LAN that would take about 2 hours. Great :-) However the reality doing the backup (or better copy from within Win10) takes almost a day.... Doing it via FTP (yes I know not so secure, but hey it is only the LAN), only takes 4h. So acceptable.

Result: I went for option 2.

A couple of days later for some reason the VM didn't start anymore, and a repair isn't working either.

(if you are wondering I did try all possible Advanced options, and whatever tips and tricks I found on Google, but no luck)

A restore will have to be done. Basically a copy of the files that are on the NAS to the USB attached SSD on my laptop, and this over the LAN. Based on my good experience with a windows copy, I started with the FTP. And the FTP from the NAS to USB attached SSD, would take (according to the FTP client), 4 days!!. Not really acceptable.

The NAS has a USB port (USB 2), attaching the SSD to the NAS and locally copying should be faster. Theoretical calculation says 4h. However based on what I currently see it will take about 18h.

Conclusion: I need something else to do the backup of my dev VM, something that is faster.

I'm going for a USB3 attached disk as backup device. In theory the backup (and the restore) should take less than 30 minutes.

Also going to do a separate backup of my sources too (as I did with my desktop).