External Drive recognized, but unable to pull backup data.

[framberries]

Hello,

Been learning proxmox in a homelab setting and reading a lot but I'm unable to find exactly what I need. I have an external usb C drive that I formatted to ext4 under the directory storage in the webgui and backed up VMs onto it before I reformatted my host PVE server to 7.1. Now that I've done that, and plugged my external drive back in, I can see the drive listed as /dev/sdc, and it's contents of sdc1, but I cannot seem to bring it up in directory again to help me restore the VMs. I am not sure if I'm missing a step, but it feels like I might've.

Is there a way to get this external drive to show like it did prior to the reinstall? If not, what might be the best method of pulling the backup data off, and then restoring the VMs?

 

[fabian]

you need to mount it (either using /etc/fstab, or a systemd mount unit) and then create a dir storage entry for the path where it is mounted (and also set 'is_mountpoint 1' on the storage.cfg entry to tell PVE that it should wait for something being mounted there before treating the storage as active).

 

[framberries]

Ah thank you! A couple of questions for someone still learn proxmox and Linux in general if I may.

How do I create a dir storage entry for it without erasing the data? Where is the storage.cfg file located; in /etc ?

 

[framberries]

This post can now be disregarded/considered solved. I was able to find the commands needed in order to temporarily restore backups from the drive by referencing this post: https://forum.proxmox.com/threads/how-to-mount-existing-disk-to-storage.66559/

 

[fabian]

for future reference:
/etc/pve/storage.cfg contains the storage definition (managed via Datacenter -> Storage in the GUI) - this doesn't change anything, it just tells PVE where to find things
setting up storages (formatting disks/creating zpools/...) is done via the Node -> Disk panel (or Ceph), and usually will also entail adding a new entry to the storage.cfg file