How to dismount and remount USB drive for manual backups on PVE

ichill55

New Member
Apr 10, 2026
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Good morning,

I’m running a small proxmox server (8.4.11) to host Home Assistant and Unifi OS Server. It’s been a great foundation for learning and has potential for expansion.

My concern now is how to backup the VMs etc. I want to use a removeable USB drive and backup manually whenever I’m about to make changes.

I’ve set up a Directory based storage area called proxback on a 2TB USB drive. Having done some backups, I now want to dismount the drive until the next backup, so that it is air-gapped and less likely to be damaged by me accidentally moving it. But I can’t use umount and eject because the drive is not shown as mounted. It seems that the drive only has a UUID identity.

I don’t understand how to safely remove it from the proxmox server so that in say, a month’s time, I can reconnect it and do another backup.

USB drive is showing as /dev/sdb and /dev/sdb1:

1775793196391.png

LSBLK output:

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LSBLK -fs

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Mount output:

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DF output:

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systemctl list-unit-files -t mount output:

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Storage area config:

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Backup config:

1775793276516.png

So now you’ve seen what I’ve done, some questions:
  • Was using a Directory storage area the right way to set up a USB device that is to be removed? If not, what should I have done? I am happy to nuke the disk and start again!
  • If the approach is OK, how can I safely dismount the USb drive for storage? And how do I then remount it when I next want to do another backup?
Thanks so much for reading this far and hopefully for your advice!

Ian