how can I access PBS backups on USB

[RobFantini]

yearly we rsync pbs backups to a large usb.
For a court case I need to access emails from one of the usb's .

I tried adding a new datastore using the directory . but got this error:

()
unable to create chunk store 'usb12' subdir "/media/usb12/pbs-backups/daily/.chunks" - unable to create directory "/media/usb12/pbs-backups/daily/.chunks" - EEXIST: File exists

# ls -la /media/usb12/pbs-backups/daily/
total 1048
drwxr-xr-x  5 backup backup    4096 Jan 22  2021 ./
drwxr-xr-x  5 root   root      4096 Aug 31  2020 ../
drwxr-x---  1 backup backup 1052672 Jul 13  2020 .chunks/
drwxr-xr-x 24 backup backup    4096 Jan 20  2021 ct/
-rw-r--r--  1 backup backup     325 Jan 22  2021 .gc-status
-rw-r--r--  1 backup backup       0 Jul 13  2020 .lock
drwxr-xr-x 38 backup backup    4096 Dec  9  2020 vm/

is there a way to access the usb backups?

 

[RobFantini]

so I'll try manually adding the storage to /etc/proxmox-backup/datastore.cfg . 1ST I am rsyncing the usb directory to regular storage ....

 

[Johannes S]

so I'll try manually adding the storage to /etc/proxmox-backup/datastore.cfg . 1ST I am rsyncing the usb directory to regular storage ....

Manually adding the storage to /etc/proxmox-backup/datastore.cfg should work. Another variant would be to mount the usb storage to a directory of your choice and afterwards adding this directory as datastore. At least I did something like that when I needed to use an external USB drive but I'm not quite sure about the actual steps I did.