Backup & restore of datacenter & node-level config?

[sbrocket]

Are there any best practices or supported tools for backing up and restoring the datacenter and/or node-level configuration? It looks like the backup support built into Proxmox VE itself only backs up individual VMs. I also noticed that if you have a VM that references node state, like say a custom cloud-init (--cicustom) setting that uses a snippet from local (/var/lib/vz) or some other storage, the VM backup also does not include or restore that.

That makes it seem like I need to take it upon myself to back up /var/lib/vz/ (but not dump), and I'm guessing if that's the case I'm going to want to back up other directories and files too. Are there any recommendations for what all to manually back up, or how to go about this?

Searching around I've seen a number of different unofficial and usually conflicting or seemingly incomplete answers to this question, and it'd be really nice to have a supported answer to this, if any exists. However I'm guessing a supported option doesn't currently exist or I would have found it, so I'd settle for an unsupported but official or at least likely correct (i.e. not just a untested guess) answer too.

 

[cheiss]

Hi,

no, a dedicated host backup functionality doesn't exist yet. You can subscribe to the issue on our bugtracker though, to get updates if something happens in that regard: https://bugzilla.proxmox.com/show_bug.cgi?id=2287

(Especially) In a clustered environment, it's often best to treat your hosts as cattles, not pets. I.e. all the PVE-specific configurations is "mirrored" on all hosts in a cluster in /etc/pve, which holds all (PVE-specific) datacenter and node-level configurations.
/etc would be the most important to backup in any case, or at least /etc/pve.