Thanks for your input lae.
I think I must have been looking at information about standalone nodes rather than clusters when planning my strategy… I can’t seem to find a straight answer to help me understand how the /etc/pve folder works. I tried overwriting/removing just that folder at first to restore the pve configs, since that’s what’s suggested in the literature I could find, but couldn’t as I kept getting permission errors.
I’d read that /etc/pve is a FUSE of the configuration database in /var/lib/, so also copied the /var/lib/pve-cluster folder. This seemed to restore the cluster configuration (but not the VMs). I then had to copy the /etc/corosync folder to get it to sync and join with the cluster properly. This presumably re-synced the /etc/pve folder with the rest of the cluster and restored the VM templates. That’s when everything was looking almost ok.
Obviously there are other things in /etc/ that I am unaware of… I’m just not sure why overwriting with relevant backups would wipe the whole cluster.
Oh well.