Creating a backup of archived vms on PBS

[cs_zol]

Hello,

We have a PVE and a PBS set up at our company, and everything is working very well. Although would like to archive some 'archived' vms from PBS to an external drive.
What i can see, is the archived vm contains the following files:
│ vm/9005/2024-10-29T01:23:02Z │ 10 GiB │ client.log drive-scsi1.img index.json qemu-server.conf

If i move these to an external drive, how would i be able to restore the vm from the .img file, just in case if it is needed?

Thanks!

 

[Johannes S]

This propably won't work since PBS saves the data as a lot of small files called chunks.
For your usecase you would add the extetnal drive as storage to your PVE and do an extra backup of the VM ( restore from PBS to a new VM in PVE before if you need a certain version).
Regards, Johannes

 

[floh8]

Better is to add a new datastore on the external drive and configure a sync between both local datastores. U can add sync filter to include only the archived vms.

 

[aaron]

If i move these to an external drive, how would i be able to restore the vm from the .img file, just in case if it is needed?

You could download these img files and when you need to restore them, first create a new VM (maybe without a disk) and then run qm disk import {vmid} /path/to/image {target storage}.

But as others mentioned, other approaches would most likely be better.

 

[FrankList80]

It would be highly appreciated if you could develop such an file "import/export" in the GUI in a future release (knowing that it would likely be 'against' the valid 'End-2-End' PBS-PVE integration which is indeed a unique USP imo)

 

[aaron]

There is works going on to make it easier to use external disks on PBS and also to import disk images and/or OVA packages AFAIK. When they will be done is a different question though