Backing up Proxmox, not machines

digininja

New Member
Oct 19, 2012
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0
1
I've got Proxmox installed on a disk that has started to fail, all the disk contains is Proxmox itself and maybe a couple of ISOs that I don't care about. All the machines are on separate disks which are fine.

What is the best way to back up the Proxmox install so I can put in a new disk then restore all the configs?

I've grabbed /etc already just in case the disk dies completely before I manage to get it backed up properly, hopefully that will give me some chance of restoration if I need it.
 
I don't know how well clonezila handles failing disks and I'm a bit worried about stressing it any more than I have to. If I can get away with just reading a handful of files off it then that would be safer than trying to read the whole disk.

Even if it does work this time I'd still like to know how to back it up jus tin case next time it is a catastrophic failure rather than a gradual one.
 
I'm getting closer to getting this restored. I did a clean install and then restored the /etc directory I'd recovered from the old disk over the new one but there were permission problems with the /etc/pve directory. I then booted a live disk and forced the restore which worked fine. After a reboot some things worked but others failed so after some reading I found that the /etc/pve directory is actually an on disk representation of a database used for clustering and is mounted at boot time so overwriting it with old files isn't going to work.

Now I need to know how I can push the backed up pve files into wherever they need to go so that when fuse mounts the directory it is mounting my old stuff.

I really can't believe that no one out there backs up their Proxmox installation and that there aren't any guides for doing it
 
I'm getting closer to getting this restored. I did a clean install and then restored the /etc directory I'd recovered from the old disk over the new one but there were permission problems with the /etc/pve directory.

What error do you get exactly (and what file do you try to restore)?
 
I was getting all sorts of errors but I think I've finally sorted it.

I ended up ovewriting as much of the /etc/pve directory as possible which setup all the machines but not their disks, I then went into each machine, added a new disk based on their old config (which I got from the 10?.conf files I'd backed up) then I overwrote the new disk it created with the old one.

Lot of messing, sure it wasn't the correct way to do it but the machines are now up and running again.

I now want to back the whole Proxmox install (not the disks, just Proxmox config) up, how so I do that the correct way?
 

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