On Wed, Jul 4, 2012 at 6:20 PM, Todd And Margo Chester
<[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> Hi All,
>
> Scientific Linux 6.2, 64 bit
>
> Whenever I have been running my XP Virtual Machine
> under KVM, my dump backup goes from 1 hr, 12 min
> to 5 hr, 30 min.   Five times slower.  Reboot fixes the problem.
>
> This does not happen if I have (only) been running my
> Windows 7 Virtual Machine.
>
> Anyone have a workaround or fix for this?

Use VirtualBox instead? Only slightly kidding: there's a great deal
that I dislike about KVM, especially the user interface, which is
based on the "libvirt" toolkit, was designed by spastic monkeys on
crack, and violates *every single one* of Eric Raymond's guidelines
for open source GUI's from his old "Luxury of Ignorance" article. This
includes the 5 guidelines I suggested and that he added to the list:
it violates *ALL* the guidelines.

A better solution is to discard XP. Seriously, mainstream support
ended in 2009: it's time to get off it

> Many thanks,
> -T
>
> $ rpm -qa \*dump\*
> dump-0.4-0.6.b42.el6.x86_64

Wait. You're using *dump*? You *do* realize that by directly reading
the blocks from the hard-drive, it's reading the blocks directly off
the disk and re-assembling file system information, which is.....
expensive computationally?  It also puts you at risk of a corrupt
restored filesystem, because cached writes that have not been
committed to disk will not be picked up by dump? This is why most
modern backup systems use something like "tar", "star" for SELinux
support, or rsync for mirroring the content elsewhere.

In fact, I'd recommend reviewing your backup system and using "rsync"
and "rsnapshot" on a cheap secondary drive. Much, much easier and
faster to recover data from, and the price comparison with tapes and
"dump" is pretty good. Rsnapshot also allows a much more effective
"incremental" backup behavior than the levels of "dump".