Adding directory storage inside container

[bommis3]

Hallo,

I am pretty new to proxmox, but I inherited an already configured system. The system consists of two physical hard disks. The first one is partitioned with the root system and LVM.

The second one consists of LVM only. Unfortunately, the root partition is quite small and I need some more space for backup. I know that I cannot create backups within a LVM storage. I also know that in order to create an additional directory storage suitable for vzdump backups, I need a filesystem.

Of course, a possible solution would be to decrease the size of the LVM partition and create a new one. However, I would like to avoid this step. Instead, I asked myself if it would be possible to create a new container in the LVM system and declare a directory within the container as a new directory storage. Is this possible somehow?

 

[Stoiko Ivanov]

if it would be possible to create a new container in the LVM system and declare a directory within the container as a new directory storage. Is this possible somehow?

Yes this is possible - as always when handling disk-drives and data - make sure you have a working and tested backup of all important data!!
Just create a new LV in either the VolumeGroup, or the Thinpool, create a filesystem (ext4, xfs) on it, mount it somewhere and add that as Directory Storage to your PVE:
https://pve.proxmox.com/pve-docs/pve-admin-guide.html#chapter_lvm

I hope this helps!

 

[Dunuin]

Wouldn't it be better to add a new third disk for backups?
If your first disk with the root filesystem will die you will lose all your configs, including the VM/LXC config files for the guests on the second disk. And of cause all guests stored on the first disk. If your second disks dies you will lose all virtual disks stored on it. So if you store your backups on disks 1 and it fails, you will lose your guests and your backups at the same time. So bad idea, to store the backups there, unless you also sync that backup folder to some NAS/cloud.

And if you really care about data loss or downtime you should consider reinstalling it using raid1. Disks will fail sooner or later.

 

[bommis3]

Thanks for your answers. Dunuin, the backup space is only used to store backups for a short amount of time there. I have a script which copies the dumps regularly to another backup server.

While I write this, I think it would be even easier if it would be possible to add the remote backup server as a storage to proxmox. But I suppose this is not possible.

 

[Stoiko Ivanov]

While I write this, I think it would be even easier if it would be possible to add the remote backup server as a storage to proxmox. But I suppose this is not possible.

dependng on how you access it you can always add it as NFS or CIFS Storage?
https://pve.proxmox.com/pve-docs/chapter-sysadmin.html#sysadmin_certificate_management

 

[Dunuin]

Or even better than a SMB/NFS share would be a Proxmox Backup Server (PBS) running on another machine. That way your backups would only consume a fraction of the space (because of deduplication) 0, backup would cause less disk IO (because of dirty-bitmapping), backups would be faster and produce less network traffic, because PBS allows incremental backups, where you only need the backup the data that changed since the last backup.