Complete crash - any shortcuts for recovery?

[fribse]

Hi All
I have a small NUC here in my homelab, it has a NVME and a SATA-600 SSD in it.
The VM disks are on the SATA drive, and the host is on the NVME.

My NVME was worn out (apparently) so when I started upgrading from 7 to 8 sunday, it just went bye-bye.
So it was a real-life firedrill of backups and procedures

I do have backups of all my VM's, so I installed a new NVME, and it was quickly up and running, and then I saw that the SATA drive still had all the VM drives, but of course the host definitions was gone from the NVME.
So I just restored them from the backup, and everything was up and running again.

But looking back I could have saved an hour or two on the restore if I could just recover the vm definitions and put them back, but I didn't find a way to do that, and at the time it was better to just follow the standard restore procedure.
Is there a way to make a backup (like for the full VM's and CT) that just stores the VM definitions?

 

[fabian]

you can recover the config from the backup with "pvesm extractconfig" (or the GUI, and copy-pasting via an editor of your choice ). there is no automated way because the backed-up config and the still-available disks might not be consistent, and this is up to the admin to decide.

 

[LnxBil]

But looking back I could have saved an hour or two on the restore if I could just recover the vm definitions and put them back, but I didn't find a way to do that, and at the time it was better to just follow the standard restore procedure.
Is there a way to make a backup (like for the full VM's and CT) that just stores the VM definitions?

Sure, just store the content of the configuration in /etc/pve somewhere else, e.g. on your sata drive

rsync -a --delete-after /dev/pve/ /mnt/sata-drive/pve-backup/

We copy them regularly on a ZFS dataset and snapshot afterwards.