Full Host Backup - What To Exclude?

[alphadog]

Using Proxmox 3.

My overall goal is that I am going to use MondoRescue to generate a relatively full backup of the host, but not the running VMs. I want to be able to do a quick restore of the host then copy the vzdumped VMs back into play; I don't want to go the "just reinstall Proxmox, reinstall all the other stuff you may have crufted on, and then /etc..." route. I want it even easier than that.

I plan on excluding the following directories at a minimum:
/proc
/sys
/tmp
/var/tmp
/mnt

Any other I should exclude on a Proxmox host?

 

[spirit]

you can also exclude "/etc/pve/*" (just keep the directory, but not the files inside)

This is a fuse filesystem, mounted from data in /var/lib/pve-cluster/

 

[BloodyIron]

Oddly enough I'm actually trying to ascertain what the OP is too, for academic purposes of course. Thanks for this little tidbit of info.

you can also exclude "/etc/pve/*" (just keep the directory, but not the files inside)

This is a fuse filesystem, mounted from data in /var/lib/pve-cluster/

@alphadog

It may not be what you want, if I'm understanding you correctly, but here is my experience thus far. This is of course assuming we're talking about a single node, Proxmox VE 3.0, as in not in cluster.

Simply, I have backed up all of /etc/, even /etc/pve/'s contents. While a VM is running (disks and ISOs are on NFS/iSCSI+LVM), I then have forcefully shut the system down (for testing purposes in this example), re-installed and just dumped the whole of /etc/ back into place. Thus far it only complains about UUID on boot, but I suspect it's just a stale fstab not relevant to the new install. Otherwise the VMs just work, and I had to reconfigure nothing; but I am testing further to verify this.


If this method is not what you're looking for I would like to know where this method falls short for you. Hope this helps though.