Backups Snapshots, Shutting Down, Starting Up of virtual machine

Question

I'm looking at setting up an automated backup schedule for my virtual systems on a headless Virtualbox server which runs on Centos 6. I would have liked to have been able to:

1. Take a snapshot of a running VM
2. Backup the snapshot of that VM in the running state (none of these files would be modified while I backed them up)
3. Copy the backup to a remote location
4. Remove the snapshot

I've done some searching and seen some discussion:
1. Snapshots using vboxmanage might not work if the system is running.
2. For some reason this process is flawed...

So perhaps I need to:

1. Shutdown the Running VM
2. Wait until the VM has completed shutdown
3. Backup the VM
4. Start the VM
5. Copy the backup to a remote location

Has anyone got a nice little script to do either of these? Is there a nice way to wait until the VM has completed shutdown?

Answer 1

Googled and found the following thread
http://www.mail-archive.com/vbox-users-community@lists.sourceforge.net/msg04668.html

At the bottom there is a link to a script to do backups with lvm. There is some other info on this message as well:
http://www.mail-archive.com/vbox-users-community@lists.sourceforge.net/msg04674.html