**Short version:**

I want to copy a thin provisioned VMFS .vmdk from the free ESXI to a NAS for backup. How I do it? Are there any way which works out of the box? Naive copying doesn't work because it copies full size instead of actually provisioned size.

Note that the particular .vmdk format relies on VMFS sparse files. However there are other thin allocated image formats, including .vmdk used by Workstation, and .ovf. So exporting the images to those formats would work just fine.

**Long versions:**

I have a lab ESXi 6.0 server (I mean for experiments, not production) with a couple of VMs there. And I want to copy .vmdk files from the ESXI to my QNAP NAS for backup purposes.

However I don't want a full backup solution. I just want to keep the QNAP offline and backup like twice a year. At this pace the backup solutions, especially free solutions, don't survive well - they tend to rot due to dropping OS support, changing formats, forgetting passwords and so on.

So I want something with close to zero setup and maintenance. Recovery performance isn't important.

I have an up to 400 GB thin volume with 40 GBs actually used.

However a simple .vmdk download from the web-based Datastore Browser downloads full 400 GBs which doesn't look right to me.

The same goes with scp/sftp.

The only solution I have found so far is to lzop the image before downloading. 

So the question is, are there any better ways which aren't overly complicated? For example Veeam requires remembering account password, using "corporate" email and downloading some 4GBs of their backup solution.