How to do an automated backup?

[Steve Lorimer <slorimer@kmbc.edu>]

Ok, should be a simple question here:  How to backup a KVM host image.

My first plan - failure:
1) Suspend / hibernate (using virsh ... save) image to disk
2) Backup vm disk image & suspend file
3) Backup .xml
4) Restore suspended image
This would accomplish a backup that could be reactivated very quickly as 
bootup would not even be required.
However, in testing it failed.  Of two VM's tried, one worked, but the 
other one never came back up.  The network interface never reenabled and 
this system itself sat maxing out it's cpu core until manually terminated.

My second plan:
1) Use virsh to shutdown the VM
2) Backup vm file & xml
3) Start vm (regular bootup)
This takes longer, but can be tolerated in order to get a backup.  
However, this fails also:
virsh -c qemu:///system shutdown kvmtest
The command fails to send any kind of shutdown request to the VM guest.  
As a result, the only thing that works is to kill it (the virsh command 
for that does work).  However, this is not acceptable for a backup.

Nothing out of the ordinary in my system setup:
VM Server:  Ubuntu Server
Guest OS's: Also Ubuntu

Any thoughts, advice?