Backup to an external HDD drive

[ikmk3]

Hello everyone,

I just started playing with PBS. First of all, I want to say that my PBS is living inside my PVE. I know this is not ideal, but for now I have no more devices available and for my use case, this is enough (learning purposes for now).

My main goal is create my scheduled backups of my VMs/LXCs with the PBS (already done), and then transfer those backups to an HDD drive connected directly to my PVE host. I would like to have all my backups in that external drive, just in case my whole host suffers some non recoverably failure. Almost, I would want to know if my machines could be recovered as easy as "copying arvhices" to a new PVE installation.

I am thinking to achieve this via rsync in a cron, but I dont know if is there any better option (or even if my goal is no achievable).

Thank you in advance!

Edit: What are files in ".chunks" folder? Are them strictly neccesary for the backups? Or could I avoid copying them?

 

[Dunuin]

The chunks in that folder are your backups. PBS will chop your VMs/LXCs into millions of small files. So you always need to backup your complete PBS datastore. And if you reinstall PVE you need to install a fresh PBS first, manually mount that datastore from the USB-HDD, manually edit your PBS storage config file to let it use the old datastore and only after that you will be able to restore some VMs.

 

[ikmk3]

The chunks in that folder are your backups. PBS will chop your VMs/LXCs into millions of small files. So you always need to backup your complete PBS datastore. And if you reinstall PVE you need to install a fresh PBS first, manually mount that datastore from the USB-HDD, manually edit your PBS storage config file to let it use the old datastore and only after that you will be able to restore some VMs.

Thank you very much!

So from I understand looking at the datastore directory in my machine, PBS stores all chunks together, so there is no way to separate each backup with its own chunks.

I will try to create a new PBS trial clone to test the import and see if it fits my needs.

Thank you again!