On Sun, Mar 09, 2025 at 23:40:30 +0100, Michael Niehren wrote: This is already possible but you need to configure the backup by passing the '--backupxml' argument to 'virsh backup-begin' such as: <domainbackup mode='push'> <disks> <disk name='vda' type='file'> <driver type='qcow2'/> <target file='/path/to/backup-vda.qcow2'/> </disk> </disks> </domainbackup> The philosophy of the 'virDomainBackupBegin()' API and any API that creates images on user's behalf is to allow configuring the path in the XML. We do provide a default but that is deliberately limited because any form of flexibility increases the corner cases that the algorithm can hit. The algorithm to create the default paths is deliberately simple and non-flexible as the users can override it via XML. The 'virsh backup-begin' similarly to other commands such as 'virsh snapshot-create' are meant as raw argument passtrhough to the underlying API thus also doesn't offer any form of syntax sugar. What would be possible and in line with existing design is to have 'virsh backup-begin-as' taking commandline parameters to create the XMLs on your behalf. For backup target we could model it similarly to '--diskspec' for snapshot-create-as. The argument namign would need to change as the backup API takes actually two XML documents, both of which can specify a list of disks. Thus while extending the default path generator is out of scope, the syntax-sugar enhanced virsh command is definitely in line what virsh provides. Feature requests are tracked in the upstream gitlab issue tracker: https://gitlab.com/libvirt/libvirt/-/issues/new Make sure to select the 'Enhancement' template for RFEs.