[TUTORIAL] External Rotating Drives

shift.cx · Wednesday at 15:59

Since there currently is no offical Support for Rotating Drives, I asked in this thread for some guidance and wanted to share my current Setup and Scripts so that other people can find this thread.

My Setup:
- 4x 20TB SATA HDD Drives that I take home each week (can be replaced for example with more or less USB Drives)
- Proxmox Backup Server with a Hotplug SATA Slot
- Webhooks to Discord (can obviously be replaced with other Platforms or E-Mail notifications)
- Colour Coded the Drives (Red, Green, Yellow, Blue) so that I know which drive is currently plugged in and which drive I will bring to work for the next backup cycle
- One Drive at a time is connected to the server, the other ones are stored offsite
- Backup runs from Monday to Friday
- first Script will eject the drive on Friday and I replace the Disk between Friday after 12:30pm or before Monday 12:30pm where the next Script will run

HowTo:
1. I plugged each Disk at a time
2. Created a ZFS and Datastore in the Proxmox Backup Server GUI for each Disk:

3. while my Disk is connected (e.g. "Blue"), I run blkid and copy the UUID:

4. Create these two Shell Scripts and Replace the UUIDs, Datastorenames and the Webhook URL:
they are both AI generated

Code:

#!/bin/bash
export PATH="/usr/sbin:/usr/bin:/sbin:/bin"

# Discord Webhook URL, should be replaced
WEBHOOK_URL="https://discord.com/api/webhooks/---------------"

# Function to send a message to Discord
send_discord_notification() {
    local message="$1"
    curl -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
         -X POST \
         -d "{\"content\": \"$message\"}" \
         $WEBHOOK_URL
}

# Define your ZFS pool and UUID mappings
declare -A ZFS_POOLS
ZFS_POOLS=(
    ["10497434753634637170"]="Blue" #["UUID"]="Datastore Name"
    ["14156652453457838743"]="Red"
    ["6857873780926006489"]="Green"
    ["8016966771343686250"]="Yellow"
)

# Initialize a message variable
NOTIFICATION=""

# Loop through the UUIDs to find the plugged-in disk
for UUID in "${!ZFS_POOLS[@]}"; do
    DEVICE=$(blkid -o device -t UUID="$UUID")
    if [ -n "$DEVICE" ]; then
        ZPOOL="${ZFS_POOLS[$UUID]}"
        NOTIFICATION="Detected disk for ZFS pool: $ZPOOL."

        # Import the ZFS pool
        if zpool import $ZPOOL; then
            NOTIFICATION="ZFS pool $ZPOOL successfully imported."
        else
            NOTIFICATION="Error: Failed to import ZFS pool $ZPOOL. It might already be imported or there could be an issue."
            send_discord_notification "$NOTIFICATION"
            exit 1
        fi

        # Remove maintenance mode from the datastore
        if proxmox-backup-manager datastore update $ZPOOL --delete maintenance-mode; then
            NOTIFICATION="maintenance mode for $ZPOOL has been removed and is ready to be used."
        else
            NOTIFICATION="Error: Failed to remove maintenance mode for datastore $ZPOOL."
            send_discord_notification "$NOTIFICATION"
            exit 1
        fi

        # Exit after processing the first detected disk
        send_discord_notification "$NOTIFICATION"
        exit 0
    fi
done

# If no disks were detected
NOTIFICATION="No known ZFS pool disks detected. Nothing to do."
send_discord_notification "$NOTIFICATION"

Code:

#!/bin/bash
export PATH="/usr/sbin:/usr/bin:/sbin:/bin"

# Discord Webhook URL, should be replaced
WEBHOOK_URL="https://discord.com/api/webhooks/---------------------------"

# Function to send a message to Discord, with JSON escaping
send_discord_notification() {
    local message="$1"
    # Escape special characters in the message for JSON
    message=$(echo "$message" | python3 -c 'import json,sys; print(json.dumps(sys.stdin.read()))')
    # Send the escaped message to Discord
    curl -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
         -X POST \
         -d "{\"content\": $message}" \
         $WEBHOOK_URL
}

# Define your ZFS pool and UUID mappings
declare -A ZFS_POOLS
ZFS_POOLS=(
    ["10497434753634637170"]="Blue" #["UUID"]="Datastore Name"
    ["14156652453457838743"]="Red"
    ["6857873780926006489"]="Green"
    ["8016966771343686250"]="Yellow"
)

# Initialize a message variable
NOTIFICATION=""

# Loop through the UUIDs to find the mounted disk
for UUID in "${!ZFS_POOLS[@]}"; do
    DEVICE=$(blkid -o device -t UUID="$UUID")
    if [ -n "$DEVICE" ]; then
        ZPOOL="${ZFS_POOLS[$UUID]}"
        MOUNT_POINT="/mnt/datastore/$ZPOOL"

        NOTIFICATION="Detected disk for ZFS pool: $ZPOOL."

        # Put the datastore in maintenance mode (set it offline)
        if proxmox-backup-manager datastore update $ZPOOL --maintenance-mode type=offline; then
            NOTIFICATION="Datastore $ZPOOL put in maintenance mode."
        else
            NOTIFICATION="Error: Failed to put datastore $ZPOOL in maintenance mode."
            send_discord_notification "$NOTIFICATION"
            exit 1
        fi

        # Sleep to ensure commands are fully applied
        sleep 2

        # Stop Proxmox Backup services to ensure they aren't holding the pool open
        systemctl stop proxmox-backup proxmox-backup-proxy

        # Remove the .lock file
        LOCK_FILE="$MOUNT_POINT/.lock"
        if [ -f "$LOCK_FILE" ]; then
            rm -f "$LOCK_FILE"
            NOTIFICATION=".lock file removed for $ZPOOL."
        fi

        # Check if any processes are using the mount point
        if ! fuser -M $MOUNT_POINT > /dev/null 2>&1; then
            NOTIFICATION="No processes are using $MOUNT_POINT. Attempting to export the pool."

            # Add a timeout for the zpool export command
            timeout 30s zpool export -f $ZPOOL
        else
            NOTIFICATION="Processes are using $MOUNT_POINT. Retrying until they release the mount point..."
            tries=10
            delay=2
            while [ $tries -gt 0 ]; do
                sleep $delay
                if ! fuser -M $MOUNT_POINT > /dev/null 2>&1; then
                    break
                fi
                tries=$((tries-1))
            done

            # Add a timeout for the zpool export command
            timeout 30s zpool export -f $ZPOOL
        fi

        # Confirm if the export was successful
        if [ $? -eq 0 ]; then
            NOTIFICATION="ZFS pool $ZPOOL exported successfully. Powering down the disk..."
            if hdparm -Y $DEVICE; then
                NOTIFICATION="The disk for ZFS pool $ZPOOL has been powered down. You can now safely unplug it."
            else
                NOTIFICATION="Error: Failed to power down the disk for $ZPOOL."
            fi
        else
            # Additional diagnostics to see why the pool is busy
            BUSY_PROCESSES=$(lsof +D $MOUNT_POINT)
            ZFS_STATUS=$(zpool status $ZPOOL)
            NOTIFICATION="Error: Failed to export the ZFS pool $ZPOOL. The pool may still be in use.\n\nBusy Processes:\n$BUSY_PROCESSES\n\nZFS Pool Status:\n$ZFS_STATUS"
        fi

        # Start the Proxmox Backup services again
        systemctl start proxmox-backup proxmox-backup-proxy

        send_discord_notification "$NOTIFICATION"
        exit 0
    fi
done

# If no disks were detected
NOTIFICATION="No known ZFS pool disks detected. Nothing to do."
send_discord_notification "$NOTIFICATION"

5. Create Cronjobs for both Scripts:

crontab -e

30 12 * * 1 /root/mount_disks.sh #Monday, 12:30pm
30 12 * * 5 /root/unmount_disks.sh #Friday, 12:30pm

6. set all Datastores to Maintenance mode (offline)

after all those steps, the following should should happen:

when the mount_disks.sh script runs, it will
- check what Drive is plugged in
- import the ZFS Pool
- remove the maintenance mode
- Post a notification on Discord if it was successful or the error message
when the unmount_disks.sh script runs, it will
- set the Datastore to offline
- stop the Proxmox Backup Services (so dont run the unmount_disks.sh script through the WebUI, It will fail! Only run it through a cronjob or via ssh)
- remove the .lock file
- check if any process is using the mountpoint
- export the ZFS Pool
- spin down the drive
- start the Proxmox Backup Service again

If you can confirm that this works, then you are free to configure your Backup/Sync Job, Prune Job and Garbage Collect Job.
In my Case, I sync all my Backups from my first Proxmox Backup Server to my second Proxmox Backup Server and set "Transfer Last" to 1, so only the latest Backup will be Transfered

My Prunejob only keeps the last 4 Backups so that at the end of the Week I only have Backups of the current Week

and the Garbe Collection runs 1 Hour after my Prune Job

Note: I'm short on time today, I will fix spelling mistakes at a later point

JensF · Wednesday at 17:23

20TB HDDs? How many GB was the first sync and how long took that? How many GB do you have to backup daily?
My setup is pretty similar but with way smaller RDX USB HDDs (1TB disks) and in my experience ZFS was too slow on single disks.
PBS performs quiet good with BTRFS on HDDs (with mount option nodatacow & strictatime). GC is way faster than on ZFS.
Maybe you want to test that too?

shift.cx · Friday at 12:56

JensF said:
20TB HDDs? How many GB was the first sync and how long took that? How many GB do you have to backup daily?
My setup is pretty similar but with way smaller RDX USB HDDs (1TB disks) and in my experience ZFS was too slow on single disks.
PBS performs quiet good with BTRFS on HDDs (with mount option nodatacow & strictatime). GC is way faster than on ZFS.
Maybe you want to test that too?

I think one full backup of our systems is about 13TB in size. with the incremental backups on top it's around 14-16TB total.
It transfers between 150MB/s - 250MB/s, my primary Proxmox Backup Server is a VM and my other Proxmox Server where I plugin the SATA Drives is also connected via 10Gbit, so the bottleneck is probably the writespeeds of my HDDs and the very first Backup takes roughly 24 Hours (+/- 4 hours).
Since the drives are connected from Monday to Friday the Backuptime doesn't matter too much.
The only contra is that the biggest amount of files we could lose (if the ENTIRE building was on fire on a Friday morning, it's unlikely that all server rooms would burn at the same time) would be a full week since we have 3 more Drives at different offsite locations from the previous weeks.

edit: even if we could get better writespeeds with BTRFS, it probably wouldn't be by much and it wouldn't matter anyways, the only thing that matters is that the HDD is ready to be picked up by Friday

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[TUTORIAL] External Rotating Drives

shift.cx

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JensF

Well-Known Member

shift.cx

New Member