[libvirt-users] re-create disk image file

[Joe Linoff]

Hi Henrik:

Thank you. Both suggestions are excellent.

Have you noticed spam messages from this email list? I have gotten
several in the past couple of days. 

Regards,

Joe

-----Original Message-----
From: Henrik Ahlgren [mailto:pablo at seestieto.com] 
Sent: Monday, November 05, 2012 11:53 AM
To: Joe Linoff
Cc: libvirt-users at redhat.com
Subject: Re: [libvirt-users] re-create disk image file

On Mon, Nov 05, 2012 at 11:03:11AM -0800, Joe Linoff wrote:
> I am curious about how to re-create a disk image file from a running 
> guest when the original disk image file is accidentally deleted. This 
> came up recently during a test scenario but I couldn't figure out how 
> to do it.

If you have unlinked the image, but qemu-kvm (or whatever hypervisor you
are running) still has it open, you should be able to to recover it by
going to /proc/PID/fd and looking for a file descriptor number that is a
symlink to your deleted image. Just copy it to a safe place. I would
first run sync inside the guest and maybe suspend it. It would be nice
if you could switch it to single user mode with all filesystems mounted
read-only, but whatever you do, avoid destroying the domain.

Or why not just attach a new disk to the guest and copy stuff inside the
guest?