Backup and Restore Proxmox Node Configuration?

[openkiwi]

Hello everyone,

I would like to ask the community about a regular sysadmin task everyone has to deal with: backup & restore. I am not talking about backing up the VMs and containers, but rather backing up the Proxmox node configuration. Such as you could then restore the exact same configuration on a freshly installed new node.

This is a critical feature has it is often required in case of hardware failure or replacement.

I have not found any documentation about this feature in the admin guide nor the wiki. So how do you guys handle it?

In my specific case, I recently acquired a RAID controller card and would like to replace my current ZFS pool by a hardware RAID. I will need to completely reinstall Proxmox and I would like to easily restore every aspect of the configuration.

Thanks in advance for your consideration \o/

 

[LnxBil]

I have not found any documentation about this feature in the admin guide nor the wiki. So how do you guys handle it?

It has been discussed in the forums a couple of times, feel free to search and try to adopt the different strategies there.

In my specific case, I recently acquired a RAID controller card and would like to replace my current ZFS pool by a hardware RAID.

That's a pity. Backup & restore cannot be easier than with a ZFS pool, just send/receive your pool incrementally. The only part that needs to be backuped and restored seperately is your boot partition. In UEFI, I just use a DOM or USB Stick, which only has some files and is backed up to the zpool regularely. In case of recovery, i bootup a live CD with ZFS integrated and restore the pool and the uefi stuff and I'm good to go.

 

[openkiwi]

That's a pity. Backup & restore cannot be easier than with a ZFS pool, just send/receive your pool incrementally. The only part that needs to be backuped and restored seperately is your boot partition. In UEFI, I just use a DOM or USB Stick, which only has some files and is backed up to the zpool regularely. In case of recovery, i bootup a live CD with ZFS integrated and restore the pool and the uefi stuff and I'm good to go.

I do not doubt that. Unfortunately, I run Proxmox at home where I prefer using most of the system RAM for VMs instead of ZFS.

 

[fireon]

For Linux oldschoolrestore do an backup wtih cron from "/etc/" and also make an packages imaging with

dpkg --get-selections '*' > packageslist.txt

After new install, add every sourceslist to the server reinstall all packages with:

dpkg –set-selections < packageslist.txt

Then copy needed file from etcbackup.

 

[LnxBil]

I run Proxmox at home where I prefer using most of the system RAM for VMs instead of ZFS.

Me too, but I also like ZFS snapshots and send/receive (mostly for backup to and from the box). Just pack enough RAM into your box :-D