Bare metal restore?

[EllyMae]

The proxmox-back-client says this:

To create a backup of a block device, run the following command:
# proxmox-backup-client backup mydata.img:/dev/mylvm/mydata

Creating Backups

Does this imply that I can also restore the block device? What if the block device is the system that I booted from? How can I restore that?

Thanks for your thoughts.

 

[Dunuin]

First you shouldn`t backup a block device that is in use. And of cause you also shouldn`t restore to device that is in use.
Solution here was to install Debian to a USB Stick, add the proxmox-backup-client to it and then boot into that Debian each time you want to backup or restore the PVE system disks.

 

[fabian]

restoring directly to a block device is not supported AFAIR (restoring to a new raw image file is though) - but you can map the backup snapshot and then use dd or similar tools to transfer it.

 

[EllyMae]

Thanks, guys. That is the same approach I have been using with Clonezilla.

but you can map the backup snapshot and then use dd or similar tools to transfer it.

So, there is no compression going on, like Clonezilla usually does.

 

[fabian]

there is compression (zstd ), but the mapped block device will decompress on the fly when retrieving chunks from the PBS server, just like a restore would

 

[EllyMae]

there is compression (zstd ), but the mapped block device will decompress on the fly when retrieving chunks from the PBS server, just like a restore would

Thanks, Fabian. I don't yet know what mapping is in a Linux context. I'll need to read up on that. Would you recommend a place to start?

 

[fabian]

it refers to running proxmox-backup-client map ... to expose a fidx archive from a backup snapshot on a PBS server as a local block device. when you read from the resulting loopback block device, the client will fetch the corresponding chunks from the PBS server, so you can use any software capable of reading block devices for accessing the backup contents, without requiring any special PBS integration.