Backups and Restoring

osobh

Member
Sep 6, 2009
47
0
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Champaign,IL
www.cazoodle.com
I find that with multiple NFS shares attached to nodes during testing, it becomes confusing with the way that Proxmox handles the naming of the backups. For example, I have a VM named "Foo" that I want to backup. Instead of Showing "Foo" and a timestamp, it shows the VMID. With multiple NFS attachments you tend to see alot of VMID104....VMID105...and again VMID104...wait what was that VM that I backed up....so that means I have to restore it to see what the VM's name is, this can be mitigated by keeping a list of each NFS attachement and what each VMID on there is associated with which VM name...But that is in no way productive or handy..

In my opinion it would be a good feature to have so that when I look at my backups I see this :

Foo - 2/13/2013
FooDev - 2/15/2013

and you can find a string here that will allow you to have renamed backup capabilities.

http://undefinederror.org/vzdump-create-kvm-backups-with-an-specific-name/

Is it possible that Proxmox can fix this so that the names are more informative on the frontend for users?
 
while I like the idea of having the choice to set a custom name for any VMs backups, another way of avoiding confusion is to ensure that VMIDs are unique across your whole domain of proxmox clusters.
the automatically generated VMIDs are only suggestions and I encourage you to avoid using a VMID twice since having two different VMs with the same ID on 2 different nodes is just asking for trouble (in the form of you mixing then up).
 
while I like the idea of having the choice to set a custom name for any VMs backups, another way of avoiding confusion is to ensure that VMIDs are unique across your whole domain of proxmox clusters.
the automatically generated VMIDs are only suggestions and I encourage you to avoid using a VMID twice since having two different VMs with the same ID on 2 different nodes is just asking for trouble (in the form of you mixing then up).

So I have 2 clusters running proxmox and have 4 different mounted NFS nodes for backing up across 3 different places. I run into this issue often when I've deleted and backed up the wrong VM to the wrong NFS node and lost that VM. Having a more semantic method of defining the backed up VM would work o everyone's benefit, then the list of VM's across domains wouldn't have to be kept as a reference.

I'd be willing to pay for this feature if this is possible, just how much this feature means to me and my setups. Hopefully Dietmar has some input on how we can get this incorporated or how we can get development on this feature.
 
Hopefully Dietmar has some input on how we can get this incorporated or how we can get development on this feature.

The problem is that everyone prefers another naming schema. And we need a fixed naming schema to identify the owner VM, so arbitrary name like your suggestion are not possible.
 
would it not be worth setting the backups to have the

VMID-ProxmoxName-Date-Time

ie

101-Foo-02022013-123456
 
I suggest you just use one backup storage (NFS export) per cluster.
 
Tom,

I thought about this for a minute and I think that the best approach is For Ex:

1) User creates VM or CT, and on the last tab have an additional comments field that is editable. These comments can be stored locally within the proxmox system so that when you do step 2 --->

2) Once a backup is triggered, the previously created comments associated with the VM will be pulled from the local data-source and when the backup has completed will appear in the Backup UI as:

OR

3) User initiates a backup of a VM or CT and does this with "Backup Now". When they get the dialog to select options for Storage - Mode - Compression there should be the Comments box to append data directly onto the VM backup info. That way when the backup has completed the additonal column "comments" will be populated with the users data.

---Name--------------------------Format------------------------Size-----------------------Comments

I think this will appease everyone's need for defining some structure to the backups, any thoughts?
 
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