VM ESXI BACKUP - LFTP

Need to backup your VM's off of your ESXi Machine? Today I decided to back them up to my USB drive. I tried to use rsync but rsync isn't on ESXi. So then i thought about LFTP. LFTP has a mirror function, and is a good alternative to rsync.

I run Ubuntu on my desktop so all i had to do was install lftp.

sudo apt-get install lftp

You will also have to enable ssh access to your ESXi Server. You can do that in the vSphere Client.

Once you have ssh enabled, you are ready to backup your vm's. You will need to power down the vm you are backing up to make this work.
Replace "password" with your esxi root password. You will also need to change the IP and the dirctory you are backing up.

In the following example:
192.168.10.10 = my esxi server
/vmfs/volumes/4edb0892-122a7778-ffc0-001a4b524ffe/endor = path of my vm on esxi
/mnt/backup/vm = my USB drive mounted on my Ubuntu Desktop Machine.

lftp -u 'root,password' sftp://192.168.10.10 -e "set ftp:ssl-protect-data true; set ftp:ssl-force true; mirror /vmfs/volumes/4edb0892-122a7778-ffc0-001a4b524ffe/endor /mnt/backup/vm"