Backup Server compatibility between versions.

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Darkk

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Sep 2, 2019
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At work we're still using 7.4-17 and PBS v2 as they are both very stable. Eventually I want to upgrade both to newest versions. But the upgrades are going to be slow in phases as I have three clusters all running the same version. I have a test and dev clusters I can use a test bed to upgrade to version 8.1.

Question is should I go ahead and upgrade all PBS to version 3 while I work on upgrading PVEs to 8.1 or do the PVE upgrades first? PVE versions are gonna be a mixed of 7.4-17 and 8.1 so don't know now reliable the backups are going to be when it comes time to restore the VMs. From the PBS FAQs I've read the compatibility between versions are best effort.

I've upgraded my PBS and small home lab cluster at home without issues as I did the upgrades all on the same day.

Thoughts?
 
jdancer said:
I asked the same question at https://forum.proxmox.com/threads/pbs-2-x-vm-restore-to-pve-8.142262/#post-638181

So, it should work.

As an extra precaution, I plan on backing up the VMs to external HD.
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Thank you for the link. I've followed through the other links as well and seems I can go ahead and upgrade the PBS from version 2 to 3 while I work on upgrading the PVE from 7 to 8 whenever I can.

I will test this scenario on my secondary cluster and backup server to make sure it works fine which I'm sure it will.
 
Darkk said:
Thank you for the link. I've followed through the other links as well and seems I can go ahead and upgrade the PBS from version 2 to 3 while I work on upgrading the PVE from 7 to 8 whenever I can.

I will test this scenario on my secondary cluster and backup server to make sure it works fine which I'm sure it will.
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Please post to confirm that PBS 3 can backup PVE 7 hosts. If that is that is the case, I'll go that route.
 
jdancer said:
Please post to confirm that PBS 3 can backup PVE 7 hosts. If that is that is the case, I'll go that route.
Click to expand...

So far I didn't have any issues running PBS 3 against PVE 7 servers. I was able to restore really old backups from PBS 3 to PVE 7. Also did new backups to PBS 3. It did created new dirty bitmap which is expected. My next thing is checking the remote sync jobs between PBS 2 and PBS 3. I don't expect any issues with that either as it's based on ZFS replication and snapshots.
 
Was able to stand up a PBS 3 instance and it was able to backup PVE 7 hosts.

It was the same using an existing PBS 2 instance to backup PVE 8 hosts.

So, no issues using PBS2/3 on PVE7/8.
 
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jdancer said:
Was able to stand up a PBS 3 instance and it was able to backup PVE 7 hosts.

It was the same using an existing PBS 2 instance to backup PVE 8 hosts.

So no issues using PBS2/3 on PVE7/8.
Click to expand...

Yep. Same here. Everything is working as expected. Awesome work by the ProxMox devs!
 
I was able to backup PVE 7 to PBS 3, but was unable to restore - operation not supported.
Code: 
proxmox-backup-client failed: Error: Operation not supported (os error 95) (500)
Now PVE 7 is beyond EOL, may be this is the reason. Who knows?

Though, I got no such error on my test node with PVE8.
 
stain said:
I was able to backup PVE 7 to PBS 3, but was unable to restore - operation not supported.
Code: 
proxmox-backup-client failed: Error: Operation not supported (os error 95) (500)
Now PVE 7 is beyond EOL, may be this is the reason. Who knows?

Though, I got no such error on my test node with PVE8.
Click to expand...

What version of PBS are you running?

I am using PBS version 3.3.2 and all of my PVE7 nodes are running 7.4-19. So far the backups and restores are still working. I just did a test restore this morning and it's working fine.

I have plans to upgrade my PVE7 nodes to PVE8 soon.
 
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In this specific instance, I see no problems, in general you should always updated your backup first provided it is backwards compatible. Forwards compatibility is generally a bigger issue (devs can’t see the future), and in case of failure, you want to be able to restore to both a new and old version of the cluster software, therefore the backup should always be ready at all times for all version. And if the backup upgrade fails, that’s less of a problem than your cluster failing with unknown restore capabilities.
 
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