Authoritative info on backup-begin versus snapshots/other state capture

Hello all Apologies for the basic nature of the question, but having recently started working with libvirt - and virtualisation in general - I find there is a lot of out-of-date and sometimes contradictory material out there across blogs, articles, stackoverflow, the usual sources... I thought I might be able to get definitive answers here. For the record, I assume libvirt.org is authoritative but while there is a lot of material there, its structure is not always clear to me. Also the lack of dates on any pages leaves some room for doubt. I am wondering if there is a recent, reliable summary of the various approaches and current best practices for backing up VMs that covers snapshots both internal and external, approaches that use backup-begin and third-party approaches which simply stop the VM and copy off files. If there is not such a summary, can anyone confirm my reading of https://libvirt.org/kbase/domainstatecapture.html that a simple backup-begin <domain-name> will: - pause the VM and quiesce the disk (in which case is qemu agent a requirement on the guest?) - generate a date-suffixed disk-only copy of a VMs disks alongside the originals wherever that storage is - not generate any backing image chains or metadata that needs to be retained Furthermore, is it then possible to restore to that point by stopping a VM, and associating that backup file with the VM either by virsh-editing its xml or overwriting the original file with the backup file. This seems to be my experience in testing this, but there are very few references to this tool compared to the many lengthy discussions about snapshots and other approaches which is a bit puzzling. It would be great to have this understanding confirmed or refined! Many thanks for any pointers