Virsh Snapshots

• virsh snapshot-create Create a snapshot from XML. See also: qemu-img and qemu-img info
• virsh snapshot-create-as Create a snapshot from a set of args.
• virsh snapshot-current Get or set the current snapshot
• virsh snapshot-dumpxml VM_MACHINE_NAME SNAPSHOT_NAME Dump XML for a domain snapshot
• virsh snapshot-edit edit XML for a snapshot
• virsh snapshot-info snapshot information. (virsh snapshot-info --domain DOMAIN_NAME --snapshotname SNAPSHOT_NAME)
• virsh snapshot-list VM_MACHINE_NAME List snapshots for a domain
• virsh snapshot-parent Get the name of the parent of a snapshot
• virsh snapshot-revert (Destructive action) revert a domain to a snapshot
• virsh snapshot-delete Delete a domain snapshot

qcow2 internal snapshots are best avoided in favour of extenal snapshots. , they do not get much attention.

Libvirt Snapshot releated changelog

• v5.6.0 (2019-08-05)
  • qemu: Allow XML validation for snapshot creation

Add flag VIR_DOMAIN_SNAPSHOT_CREATE_VALIDATE to validate snapshot input XML. For virsh, users can use it as virsh snapshot-create --validate

• v5.2.0 (2019-04-03)
  • snapshots: Add support for topological listings

• v5.1.0 (2019-03-04)
  • External snapshot metadata redefinition is fixed

Attempting to use VIR_DOMAIN_SNAPSHOT_CREATE_REDEFINE to reinstate the metadata describing an external snapshot created earlier for an offline domain no longer fails.

• v3.5.0 (2017-07-04)
  • qemu: snapshot: retrieve image metadata from user provided files

Disk images of an external snapshot created with VIR_DOMAIN_SNAPSHOT_CREATE_REUSE_EXT flag specified would not be scanned for metadata after recent changes. The metadata is necessary to allow keeping relative paths between images when doing a block-commit.

Related commands

• virsh list --with-snapshot
• virsh backup-begin

Activities

1. KVM: Create Live backups

See also

• virsh: Storage information, Connecting, Operations, Memory, Snapshots, Networking, CPU, release notes, virsh nodedev-list
• Virsh Snapshots: virsh snapshot-create-as, virsh snapshot-info, virsh snapshot-list, virsh blockjob, virsh snapshot-revert (Destructive action), virsh snapshot-delete
• libvirtd: systemctl status libvirtd, systemctl status libvirt-guests, Libvirt release notes, logs, libvirtd.conf, /etc/libvirt/, /var/log/libvirt/

https://www.berrange.com/posts/2017/02/10/the-surprisingly-complicated-world-of-disk-image-sizes/

https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/qemu-devel/2018-12/msg03324.html