I’m running Fedora Server 41 and created a VM in KVM. My crude way of backup was to shutdown the VM weekly, make a copy of the .qcow2 file (located on /var/lib/libvirt/images) and the xml definition (located in /etc/libvirt/qemu). I have copied these two files to another server but for some strange…

Create a new VM and tell it to use your existing .qcow2 file. Of course you will have to get the hardware options right to support your VM. You should be able to interate the options to get that right. Make sure you have a copy of the .qcow2 image incase you have to start again.

Restoring a KVM VM from the .qcow2 file

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augenauf (Flo) March 6, 2025, 12:30pm 4

Hi, do you use virt-manager? It has the option to snapshot your VM, see

F37 kvm/qemu : How to create snapshots and manage them
19.7. Managing Snapshots | Red Hat Product Documentation

For cli tool virsh, following guide has useful information:

How to Create KVM Snapshot with Virsh Command and Virt-Manager? | Vinchin Backup
Virt Manager Snapshots

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Restoring a KVM VM from the .qcow2 file

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