May export an snapshot of the VM as it is running in production (depend on the virtualization, and how unsure I am of manual changes or tweaks were done on it i

May export an snapshot of the VM as it is running in production (depend on the virtualization, and how unsure I am of manual changes or tweaks were done on it in the past. I can do that once or after big changes are done (configurations, distribution/db versions updates, things like that). For databases they all have programs to export their databases, like pg_dump or mysqldump, and compressed. Is good to keep some historic backups (not just the last one) do you can go back in case to before some not yet detected harmful change. How much? It depends on for what you use them, some may be required by law for years, or be totally meaningless for you in a few days. Backing up the transactions that happened since the last backup to do a point in time recovery, even having a running slave with that information, will be good too. About files and directories, borg backup is great. You can have a remote server with ssh as repository, and you may use it to have very efficient historic backups too.