Backup naming policy

[DynFi User]

Hello,

It is really very very annoying (to say the least) to have Containers and VM backed up without having the name of the container in the prefix of the backup.

There is nothing more similar than :

vzdump-lxc-125-2016_12_13-15_43_49.tar.lzo

Than the same backup that you will do couple of days after :

vzdump-lxc-125-2016_12_23-13_13_49.tar.lzo


But in the mean time :

1. Server LXC-123 might have been trashed
   
2. New server might have grabbed the name LXC-123 as next available tag
   
3. So you have to keep a file where you will do the mapping between backed up VM and container and real name…

It should be fairly simple to include in the template name the name of the VM (which might not change every day).


This is just a proposal, but It will probably ease the life of thousands users of your super software.


Sincerely yours.

 

[tom]

See also https://bugzilla.proxmox.com/show_bug.cgi?id=438

 

[DynFi User]

See also https://bugzilla.proxmox.com/show_bug.cgi?id=438

Renaming Backups in Hook Script does not work, because it breaks maxfiles detection an backup rotation.

Well, It would be simpler to just migrate all backup to this improved version.
The suggestion of adding a ticker to include the name of the VM is nice and shouldn't break anything but older backups.

From my point of view (and obviously others) - It is better to move on with something better rather than keeping something that is totally unusable… Having hundreds of backups with similar ID is not usable.

Or maybe a way to solve this would be to have something to "inspect the archive" which will extract from the tar archive the info of the container (Notes, Network, Resources, …) ?

This should avoid one person to have to decompress many archives to find out which one is the right one.

 

[fabian]

Or maybe a way to solve this would be to have something to "inspect the archive" which will extract from the tar archive the info of the container (Notes, Network, Resources, …) ?

This should avoid one person to have to decompress many archives to find out which one is the right one.

that is already implemented in "pvesm extractconfig" and available on the GUI as well.. also note that the VM/CT name is contained in the backup log which is stored right next to the backup in plain text..

 

[gkovacs]

See also https://bugzilla.proxmox.com/show_bug.cgi?id=438

Hello,
It should be fairly simple to include in the template name the name of the VM (which might not change every day)..

This has been one of the most requested features in Proxmox due to it's great positive impact on usability, also probably one of the easiest to implement, yet the Proxmox team has been unwilling to add this to the backup job options for some unknown reason for years now.

The argument that it would break number of backups limit of a storage is pretty much an edge case, also non-destructive and fairly low impact, not to mention the fact that there are so many things that already do break things in Proxmox yet you can turn them on easily (one example would be IOthread that breaks snapshot backup functionality.)

Also many of us who have already suggested this feature want it only as an option, default backup naming functionality should stay the same, but you should be able to set a backup job up with this feature enabled if you want.

I hope they reconsider, as this option would bring a great improvement to the Proxmox user experience.

 

[tom]

This has been one of the most requested features in Proxmox due to it's great positive impact on usability, also probably one of the easiest to implement, yet the Proxmox team has been unwilling to add this to the backup job options for some unknown reason for years now.

gkovacs, the reason is well explained many times (breaks maxfiles detection an backup rotation), please stop writing such totally wrong facts.
the suggestion to change a running backup rotation system into a broken system is probably not what our users want, this is not a the most requested feature ...

the discussion about improvements is a valid one, but do not forget to keep an eye on the impact of the suggested changes.

 

[Petr Konderla]

Hi what about to just add it to the notes during backup process), currently I'm adding it manually... (yes it's anyoning)

 

[fabian]

Hi what about to just add it to the notes during backup process), currently I'm adding it manually... (yes it's anyoning)


View attachment 29146

we've discussed something similar to this, but no patches written yet

 

[Petr Konderla]

quick bash hack:

for i in `ls -d ./*/*/` ; do dd if=$i/qemu-server.conf.blob bs=1 skip=12 2>/dev/null | zstdcat | grep name > $i/../notes ; done

running from /mnt/datastore/localhost/vm/ folder on pbs server.

( I was lazy to do it manully )