Changing backup locations on proxmox on the same disk but different partition

[Johnny au paré]

Hi,

Beginner to proxmox here and I'm looking to change my backup directory as my current is full.

I have space on the disk but I would ideally need to put the backups on a separate partition of the same disk.

Here is a screenshot of lsblk


also here is blkid



I have 1x 1TB ssd on the server and do not dispose of another disk at the moment, or rather I cannot physically access the server at this time. \

My pve root is only 100G and I would need to add another backup directory.

Can I go in datacenter - Storage - add directory - and then point to sda3/"newly created backup directory'' ?

I cannot seem to find an answer regarding this specific situation so I thought I would ask.

I understand it would be simpler, and better to add a disk but this is not possible at the moment.

1 - I am thinking, should I shrink sda3, make sda4 and mount it to add backups?

2- Is it possible to store backups on the same volume as VMs? Bad idea for multiple reasons but also maybe impossible since sda3 is LVM2_member and not ext4?

Any thoughts directions or links to documentation is appreciated. I am currently reading through Proxmox documentation, notably https://pve.proxmox.com/pve-docs/chapter-pvesm.html

Thank you

 

[datschlatscher]

One important thing here is that sda3 is not a partition how you might have come to known those. But rather the installer set it up via the Logical Volume Manager. This is the reason why there are all these entries of type lvm in the hierarchy.

There are two logical volumes that are of special importance here. One would be sda3/pve-root which represents the root partition of your Proxmox installation. Backups to the local storage in the GUI will also be written here.
The other is sda3/pve-data which is represented by the .../tdata and .../tmeta partitions. This is a thin pool, which means that the sum of the size of its child volumes can exceed the size of the full size of the pool, as only the data that is actually written takes up space. This partition is used mostly for VM and container disks and storage.

Your root partition takes up about 100GB, with the thin-pool data partition, the metadata partition and the swap partition taking up what is left of that.
This means that you actually do not have any noteworthy unconfigured space left on your disk. The installer leaves about 16GB unconfigured, which you might be able to extend your root partition with, but depending on what you want to backup, this might not take you far.
Nonetheless, changing the sizes of the LVM partitions and especially of your root drive should really not be done while your system is running. This means going that route would also require you to access your server physically, e.g. with a recovery media USB.

Your best bet might be to create a new logical volume in the pve-data thin pool. Which you can subsequently mount somewhere in your system and as a last step you can create a directory storage to path where this disk is mounted and configure it to store backups.
However, this still begs the question why you want to make backups on the same disk that your data came from, as this will not protect you from data loss in the case that your server hardware and disk fails.