Proxmox backups running but no data?

Operating Systems & Open Source Linux
1

Complicated story: basically I want to transfer from one physical machine to another. And so I’m trying to backup my VMs to an internal HDD so that I can restore them later.

I have successfully created a backup directory on the HDD I installed and I can run the backup command successfully on each VM.

However, the backup (snapshot) only seems to backup the config data for the VM and not actually the VM and its data. I’ve watched Craft Computing’s tutorial on migrating with Proxmox (https://youtu.be/BkVi2vRB75Q?t=197) and followed the exact steps that he takes, except selecting my backup HDD instead of local.

Is there something I’m missing? Or is there another way of taking a full backup?

EDIT (extra info): each backup is around 500 bytes. Each should be at least a few gigabytes!

2

VMs are usually stored in the form of an image, can you see these in your directory? Furthermore, do you have the permissions set correctly?

3

I’m totally inexperienced with Linux so I’m quite capable of making simple mistakes like permissions. Or in this case, it looks like I had the “backup” checkbox in each VM’s storage file turned off…

Well done me.