Restore VM's in Proxmox via PBS... I nuked my homelab

Hi…

I am in a bit of a hard spot and before I get myself into a harder spot, I figure I should make some posts and make sure I move forward correctly.

Slight backstory, I attempted to move my proxmox host from a single disk to a RAID1 ZFS array, I attempted to do this via creating a node with the new boot media, migrate VM’s over, move ZFS boot media to the homelab hardware… TLDR; this went sideways on me. I could potentially spend some time to get that fixed, but realistically, lets assume this is a no go.

I can somewhat easily get proxmox installed fresh once again, and all of my VM’s were backed up (to my virtual truenas box…) via PBS. I have a backup config of truenas so I can download truenas, spin up a VM, and get truenas back up relatively quickly.

The next step is what I have never done, and want to make sure I fully understand before I go down this path… I will need to spin up a new PBS VM, point it to my NFS share with all the saved VM’s on it, and… then what? Will it automatically recognize there is backup data there? I have my backups encrypted, if that matters (I do have the password).

How do I go about installing PBS and getting it to recognize my backups so I can restore them? Hopefully the backups are not tied to the PBS client itself, that would be rather catastrophic.

Well, taking a step back I was able to get the new SSD back into the cluster and was able to migrate everything back to how it was. Crisis averted.

I only used the backup function of Proxmox to backup to another Proxmox server - so I dunno if this advice works. If the PBS backups are structurally the same, you could point Proxmox to your share with the backups (by creating a new storage in the GUI and select stored data type “backups”). Then you could restore the VMs directly.

Edit: Seems that PBS uses deduplication and other techiques, so the data format most likley isn’t the same.

How did you backup to another server? This potentially could be helpful since I am not at a point where I am unsure how to actually make this migration.

I add a smb share as data storage in the Proxmox GUI, select the data type „backup“. That’s it basically.

I run a second Proxmox server which runs a privileged LXC container which mounts a ZFS dataset and shares it via samba. This second Proxmox host also mounts this share itself via the Webgui. So I can backup and restore the VMs on both servers if needed. Proxmox only does full backups, though.

Hmm, can you explain this in more detail?

I only have 1 proxmox server, but I have a test bench I can set up for random tests or as a temporary backup location. I could set it up with proxmox or proxmox backup sever temporarily in order to do some sort of backup of all VM’s for example.

I am just not entirely following what your setup is exactly, but it sounds like an option I may be able to use in order to get things backed up to an external box from my main proxmox host in order to do this reformat to a ZFS raid 1 boot solution.

My explaination is a bit convoluted - what I am trying to get across is that you can use a smb share for your Proxmox Backups and that you can use the backup/backup restore function to move VMs between different Proxmox hosts.

My setup:

[Proxmox Host 1]

  • Mounted SMB Backup Dataset from Proxmox Host 2 (added via Webgui)

[Proxmox Host 2]

  • Backup Dataset
  • LXC Container which mounts Backup Dataset and shares it via samba

Ah, interesting and good to know. My current PBS dataset is mounted via NFS to a truenas dataset… but since truenas is virtual under proxmox, it makes this a bit extra interesting in the case where I am trying to move boot drives.

I could set up a similar setup with my test bench, instal either proxmox itself or PBS, and try and backup the VM’s to that machine.