best way to restore a backup without overwriting virtual disks?

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zenowl77

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Feb 22, 2024
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whats the best way to restore backups without overwriting the current disks?

i have backups of many of my VMs i am trying to restore, but the disks are still in place on the drives, i just lost the config files linked to them, so really i just want to restore the config files to proxmox without actually making any changes to the current virtual disk files.

is there a way to restore without overwriting disks or should i restore the VM then somehow move the old disks into place and do a rescan or something?

there are changes to the disks i would rather not lose and i dont want to risk losing any disks that were previously associated, etc (as some of them are terabytes in size)
 
Recreate the VM configuration files from memory. You might want to create a new similar VM (without virtual disks) with the same number using the GUI and then run qm rescan VM_ID_NUMBER to scan for the existing virtual disks (assuming you added the old storage to the new Proxmox). Then reattach the virtual disks to the VM via the GUI (deciding on IDE, SATA or SCSI and maybe fix the boot order setting).
This is asked somewhat regularly so you might be able to find some existing threads that explain it in more detail. Make sure to backup any drives beforehand to prevent mistakes.
 
leesteken said:
Recreate the VM configuration files from memory. You might want to create a new similar VM (without virtual disks) with the same number using the GUI and then run qm rescan VM_ID_NUMBER to scan for the existing virtual disks (assuming you added the old storage to the new Proxmox). Then reattach the virtual disks to the VM via the GUI (deciding on IDE, SATA or SCSI and maybe fix the boot order setting).
This is asked somewhat regularly so you might be able to find some existing threads that explain it in more detail. Make sure to backup any drives beforehand to prevent mistakes.
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i was afraid i might have to do that, i already had to with my storage.cfg, fstab and other files haha, thank you for your reply, i appreciate it.
 
leesteken said:
If you have backups (I assumed not but I re-read your post) then you can use the Show Configuration button to see the configuration of the backup.
Click to expand...
thank you, yeah, i have backups of some of them anyways, all my main VMs i backed up the main disk and configuration for them thankfully. only some of my Containers were completely lost and ill have to remake the configurations and hope for the best with those, i hadnt backed up my audiobook container yet, but thankfully i had docker and jellyfin backed up and the config files backed up from last time i edited them on my laptop, only lost a few months off jellyfin which isnt the end of the world.
 
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> whats the best way to restore backups without overwriting the current disks?

Stand up another proxmox node and bulk restore, or if you have sufficient storage space restore the entire VM to a different VMID. Replace old vdisks as necessary
 
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