How do I backup my VMs to a CIFS subdirectory on a NAS?

[danielwerner]

Hi!

Apologies if I placed this topic wrong or if it's been discussed before; I couldn't find anything.

I want to backup my VMs to a subdirectory/subfolder on my Synology NAS share, via CIFS. However, it seems I can only backup to the shared folder itself. I tried Datacenter > Storage > Add > CIFS and then set share as "/share1/folder1" but it says this is not reachable. I can only set the actual shared folder (so "share1"), not anything inside it.

What am I doing wrong? Thanks in advance!

Bonus question: When I have the CIFS share active so it shows up as a CIFS disk I get a LOT of logs in my NAS about Proxmox accessing it. Every 10th second actually, and it can't be turned off (bad by Synology). I guess this is since Proxmox wants to update the available disk space etc all the time. However, I don't need this at all. Can it be turned off? Due to the log spamming I can't have the disk active in Proxmox (and therefore can't do a scheduled backup). It's not the end of the world but it would be nice if it could be changed.

 

[Dunuin]

Hi!

Apologies if I placed this topic wrong or if it's been discussed before; I couldn't find anything.

I want to backup my VMs to a subdirectory/subfolder on my Synology NAS share, via CIFS. However, it seems I can only backup to the shared folder itself. I tried /share1/folder1 but it says this is not reachable. I can only set the shared folders, not anything below it.

What am I doing wrong? Thanks in advance!

You can't do that. You set a CIFS share as the backup storage and PVE will use that and create a folder "./dump" in it to store the backups. So if your mount "\\BackupShare" the backups will always be stored in "\\BackupShare\dump". If you want multiple folders to contain your backups create multiple CIFS shares.

Bonus question: When I have the CIFS share active so it shows up as a CIFS disk I get a LOT of logs in my NAS about Proxmox accessing it. Every 10th second actually, and it can't be turned off (bad by Synology). I guess this is since Proxmox wants to update the available disk space etc all the time. However, I don't need this at all. Can it be turned off? Due to the log spamming I can't have the disk active in Proxmox (and therefore can't do a scheduled backup). It's not the end of the world but it would be nice if it could be changed.

Thats needed because PVE needs to check if the Share is still available and can't be tunred off. Only way to prevent that is to create a hook-script that will add your CIFS backup storage dynamically when you start end backup and remove that storage when the backup is finshed. Search this forum, there are some threads about exactly this use case so the NAS disks can be spinned down. That way there only will be an backup storage while backing up so your NAS won't be hit by status checks.

 

[danielwerner]

You can't do that. You set a CIFS share as the backup storage and PVE will use that and create a folder "./dump" in it to store the backups. So if your mount "\\BackupShare" the backups will always be stored in "\\BackupShare\dump". If you want multiple folders to contain your backups create multiple CIFS shares.

Ah, thanks, that clears it up! So there's no way to backup to " "\\BackupShare\myfolder\dump"?

Maybe the best way to go about this is to backup to a hidden shared folder and create a script in the NAS to move the contents of that shared folder into my preferred subdirectory on the other share.