[SOLVED] Another how do I restore question from PBS

[grottoguy]

Hello all.
I've been hunting for a while, sorry if I've missed the answer here.
I had 2 nodes, call them Node A and Node B.
Each had its own PBS, call them PBS A and PBS B
Each node ran 'local' backups of the LXC's on the node to its local PBS, each with its own namespace (A or B)
In addition, the PBS servers did a sync job between each other.
A is currently down and I'm coincidentally considering repurposing A's hardware.

I imagined (nope, hadn't tested it yet, sorry) that since I could see the backup jobs successfully completing, and the backups on each other's PBS storage, that I'd be able to relatively easily restore them.
I can easily restore B backups using the B node from the PBS storage with the GUI, using the restore button (and presumably also easily via command line).

But it appears that although I can happily browse A's backups on B's node, I don't see a way to use B's PBS or node B to restore any A node lxc's to the B node 'easily'.
It appears that the guidance is to recreate a backup server and sort of reclaim those 'orphaned' backups.

Is that really correct? Do I have to rebuild the A node, plus the A PBS server, or at least another A PBS Server (on the B node perhaps), just to get to those backups and restore them?

In my case, I actually would be quite happy to quickly restore those lxc's onto Node B, and then take my time redoing node A in parallel, rather than rebuild A just to be able to restore the lxc's.

Am I missing something?
Thanks for any feedback.
Here are a couple snapshots:
This shows the B backups in the B PBS storage node, with the easy restore button.



This shows the backups of Node A, synced over to the B PBS. and happily waiting for me to restore them.

So these backup files (in their own separate namespace, but with ID's that might conflict with B's IDs), are what I want to restore, but to B, without having to stand up node A or another PBS altogether (at this second).
I




Thanks again for helping my fuzzy brain out.

 

[Neobin]

If I do understand your constellation correctly:
In your PVE B, you need to add PBS B as a storage again (e.g. additionally), but this time you specify namespace A while adding it.

Be careful with the clashing VMIDs! You probably want to restore them to another new/free/unused VMID respectively...

 

[grottoguy]

If I do understand your constellation correctly:
In your PVE B, you need to add PBS B as a storage again (e.g. additionally), but this time you specify namespace A while adding it.

Be careful with the clashing VMIDs! You probably want to restore them to another new/free/unused VMID respectively...

Hmm.
I have both my PBS b and the storage for it online.

In that PBS, I can browse to both the node b backups AND the node a backups that were synced to it

I am just wondering if I truly have to recreate a node A and or a PBS A just to restore from those perfectly fine backups.

If you meant to say you think I need to create a new PBS A with its original A namespace, I think that's in line with what I've been seeing. But I am stuck on whyy that is actually necessary. It seems to me that doing a sync between PBS nodes would logically imply that one could restore the backups from either obs node in the case of an outage of one of them.

Otherwise it seems like just doing a raw replication at some other layer would be of no less value than the other PBS nodes knowing all about the backups and letting your browse them.

In other words, the benefit of setting up all the sync / pull replication seems limited if one has to rebuild the source PBS server just to be able to restore those backups sitting happily in PBS.

 

[grottoguy]

OK-
With a fair bit of help from Claude, here's my conclusion and positive outcome.
Here's my scenario (redundant PBS servers, each with their own storage, and each doing a pull of the other's backup jobs using a sync), but with one PBS server and storage offline / gone / being decommissioned / etc,

PBS A with DataStore A and namespace A
PBS B with DataStore B and namespace A

If one takes A offline, one can still see all of A's backups under the A namespace inside PBS B.
However, see below... 'the proxmox storage entry can only 'see' one namespace per configuration'.
Ironically, that's where I started- I figured I could change the 'namespace view' on the PBS server to see those other backups as 'native'.
But apparently that doesn't work (I found no option), so this is a pretty simple solution (create a new datastore, with the other namespace, point at the pbs that has those synced / other namespace backups in them, then restore).

Once I had a new datastore, aimed at the remaining PBS server and storage, but with the other namespace, I could see the backups (like I could from the PBS server itself), but now I could restore as well.
It also modified the VMID for me automatically, resolving the potential overlapping vmid conflict issue.

So the only outcome will be a new IP address for that server, which is ok / makes sense since my two proxmox universes are in different sites and networks altogether.

The Problem:​

Your existing APBS storage is configured to access the default/A namespace. Even though your PBS server contains both:

• A backups (default namespace)
• BBackups namespace (from sync)

The Proxmox storage entry can only "see" one namespace per configuration.

What You're Creating:​

You're not creating a new PBS server - you're creating a second storage entry that points to:

• Same PBS server (localhost or wherever A PBS is)
• Same datastore (Apbs)
• Different namespace (BBackups)