External USB Not Available/Visible After Reboot

[virtualtechie]

I got an external usb drive connected for backing up VMs. When I reboot my PVE host the usb drive is no longer available and not visible under Disks. I read something about automounting when a reboot takes place.

How can I enable this?

 

[Dunuin]

How did you add the usb HDD initially?

 

[virtualtechie]

How did you add the usb HDD initially?

Node>Disks>Wiped and Initiated Disk>LVM-Thin>Create Thinpool. Everything was fine until I rebooted the host. Now the storage icon for the USB drive has a question mark icon and shows as "Status: unknown".

 

[Dunuin]

Node>Disks>Wiped and Initiated Disk>LVM-Thin>Create Thinpool. Everything was fine until I rebooted the host. Now the storage icon for the USB drive has a question mark icon and shows as "Status: unknown".

That sounds wrong. With that you create a LVM-Thin pool and a LVM-Thin storage can't be target for backups. Or did you run a PBS as a VM/LXC on that Thin-Pool storage then? How did you then stored backups on it?

Whats your output of lsblk, vgs, lvs and cat /etc/pve/storage.cfg?

 

[virtualtechie]

That sounds wrong. With that you create a LVM-Thin pool and a LVM-Thin storage can't be target for backups. Or did you run a PBS as a VM/LXC on that Thin-Pool storage then? How did you then stored backups on it?

I never got to store backups on it yet. I was planning to use the usb drive as a backup device. I guess I was wrong in thinking I could use LVM-Thin pool for backups. Aside from PBS, what do you recommend? I would still like to use this usb drive as a backup device.

 

[Dunuin]

If you want fast and space efficient incremental backups then setting up a PBS server would be the tool of choice.
If you just want some single file backup archives, each with the full size of the VM, then I would wipe that disk and create a "Directory" storage instead of a LVM-Thin pool. This should then format the disk as something like ext4 partition, automount is using systemd and add a directory storage pointing to that mountpoint.

 

[virtualtechie]

If you want fast and space efficient incremental backups then setting up a PBS server would be the tool of choice.
If you just want some single file backup archives, each with the full size of the VM, then I would wipe that disk and create a "Directory" storage instead of a LVM-Thin pool. This should then format the disk as something like ext4 partition, automount is using systemd and add a directory storage pointing to that mountpoint.

For now I just want the latter. I'll look into setting up PBS later on. I'll setup a Directory storage as you've mentioned.