Gui option to move backups from namespace to another or entire namespaces under others

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AmateurProgrammer

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Sep 17, 2024
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Hi! I was wondering would it be possible for pbs to include gui option for moving the backups around between different namespaces?
Currently the manual moving of files/directories to make the change is kinda cumbersome. Also I have not found a way to move specific snapshots of vm:s and containers from namespaces to another. The gui option would be really nice. I would use it kinda lot when archiving some vm:s for example.
 
Johannes S said:
This is already possible with sync jobs, did you try creating one?

https://pbs.proxmox.com/docs/managing-remotes.html#sync-jobs
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Yes, I'm aware that I can usee sync jobs to achieve this but that too seems cumbersome as I need to create a sync job that would be run once. An actual move function would be nice. It could use the sync thing in the background for example but create the job automatically without saving it in the configfuration.
 
Hi,
AmateurProgrammer said:
Hi! I was wondering would it be possible for pbs to include gui option for moving the backups around between different namespaces?
Currently the manual moving of files/directories to make the change is kinda cumbersome. Also I have not found a way to move specific snapshots of vm:s and containers from namespaces to another. The gui option would be really nice. I would use it kinda lot when archiving some vm:s for example.
Click to expand...
please do open an enhancement request on https://bugzilla.proxmox.com/ for this, referencing this thread. A move/rename feature is definitely something of interest (e.g. for host backups after host name changes, reorganizing the datastore into subnamespaces, ...). This should however operate on a namespace/group level, not a snapshot level.
 
there also is a push and pull API endpoint (and corresponding proxmox-backup-manager) command ,if you want to do one-off syncs ;)
 
AmateurProgrammer said:
Is it possible to use those commands to move/copy single snapshots from namespace to another within a datastore?
Click to expand...

not really. the filtering options are the same as for sync jobs (namespaces, groups, and then the last X snapshots)
 
but note that for copying within a datastore, the overhead of copying a single snapshot or 20 is basically none, as only metadata has to be copied anyway. so you can copy the whole group and then prune it afterwards..
 
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fabian said:
but note that for copying within a datastore, the overhead of copying a single snapshot or 20 is basically none, as only metadata has to be copied anyway. so you can copy the whole group and then prune it afterwards..
Click to expand...
Yes this is exactly what I was talking about. I would like to such moves within the datastore specifying the snapshot I want to move and then the move feature would do the group copy and then prune it automatically to preserve the snapshots from the selection.

So it would work like this:
select starting snapshot from a namespace ->select how many snapshots after that you wan to to preserve.
move function would do automatic sync or whatever is needed to first copy the entire group and then prune the unnecessary snapshots away automatically such that the result is that there remains only the selected snapshots in the destination namespace.

Simply put: THe move feature would just do the copy and then auto prune the destination and source according to the move selection. Am I right?
 
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IMO this feature should be a pure rename/move acting on group level to facilitate restructuring of the datastore hierarchy, pruning of individual snapshots is better handled by a prune. Implementation details are however better discussed in the bugtracker.
 
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Chris said:
IMO this feature should be a pure rename/move acting on group level to facilitate restructuring of the datastore hierarchy, pruning of individual snapshots is better handled by a prune. Implementation details are however better discussed in the bugtracker.
Click to expand...
Btw do you guys have a roadmap available somewhere that we could check for potential new planned features on your products?
 
I get it that this could be simpler.
And if you don't know how it all works, it seems stupid that there's not a simple way.

But I setup a new sync hub/slow storage PBS server and started syncing content to it today.
Of course, it went into the wrong namespace. That had to happen.

Anyway, I killed the job.
Deleted all the backups it had synced.
Changed the namespace it would drop to.
Executed the job.

And if you know how PBS works, you know that it instantly synced those VMs back into the new location.
Because the data was all still there. Sucking down the metadata again took less than 4 seconds.

So in short, I did this "move your sync'ed VMs around" task today, and it took 4 seconds.
 
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