Copy backups to external drive

[ippericsson]

Hi All,

I'm looking for a way to copy backups from our ZFS datastore and onto an external drive so that we can send it off site for our offsite DR backups, i tried just copying the files but then PMBS doesn't recognize them as a backup when we try to re-import them.

Anyone have any ideas how would be best to do what we need?

Thanks.

 

[Cookiefamily]

Hi, the easiest way of doing that would be to create a Sync Job to a Remote (that is not actually a remote, let me explain).
You can do offsite-copies to other PBS Servers with the "Sync Job" feature for datastores. In this case we want to sync not to a different PBS server, but to our same server with a different (external) drive.

To do this, create a "Remote" in Configuration->Remotes that points to localhost. Then create a datastore on your external HDD, click on that newly created Datastore, go to "Sync Jobs", create a new sync job, choose the "Source Remote" you just created earlier that points to localhost and set "Source Datastore" to the Datastore you want to copy to that external drive.

 

[ippericsson]

Thanks for the reply! Finally managed to get this set up and seems to be working!

 

[n27051538]

Hi,
I have found one more variant:

 proxmox-backup-debug recover index drive-scsi0.img.fidx /path/to/.chunks

or something like

cd /mnt/usb
proxmox-backup-debug recover index /backup/vm/875/2025-09-11T18:12:13Z/drive-scsi0.img.fidx /backup/.chunks

This command converts VM disk from chunks to static file drive-scsi0.img.

This is described in PBS documentation:
https://pbs-server-address:8007/doc...store-without-a-running-proxmox-backup-server

 

[_gabriel]

BTW, proxmox-backup-debug recover index output is RAW .img with fully allocated space even zeroes are written to destination drive which is slow when allocated space is lot of more than used space.
If PBS is available, proxmox-backup-client map then qemu-img convert -p -f raw /dev/loop0 -O qcow2 is faster and space efficiency.