How to include external USB drive in backup of VM

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Herumakilo

New Member
Aug 1, 2023
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Hi All,
I've just started with Proxmox and have been making good progress, but have ran into an problem.
I currently have a cluster with 2 x PVE and 1 x PBS.
I have a VM running NextCloud, using an external USB drive as the Data store.
I can't see any way to include the USB drive in the backup of the VM.

Is this possible and could someone point me in the right direction of how to configure this?
THE USB drive is currently configured as a Passthrough to the VM using "Use USB Vendor/Device ID" and mounting using UUID in fstab.

Thanks in advance.
 
Herumakilo said:
Is this possible and could someone point me in the right direction of how to configure this?
THE USB drive is currently configured as a Passthrough to the VM using "Use USB Vendor/Device ID" and mounting using UUID in fstab.
Click to expand...
Not possible. You need to have a virtual disk on it in order to backup it with PBS.
 
Herumakilo said:
Could you explain "You need to have a virtual disk on it in order to backup it with PBS"?
Click to expand...
a passthrough device is not a virtual disk, it's passthroughed. If you want to have a backup with PBS, you need a virtual disk. Only those can be backuped with PBS via the Proxmox VE backup mechanism. So this is what you need to do, passthrough does not work and can never work. KVM/QEMU is the backend technology for fully-virtualized guests and it uses an internal snapshot in order to get a more consistent snapshot of your virtual disks and copy the contents to the backup server. With a passthroughed devices, this is not possible, therefore no backup is possible.

Another approach is to have a backup inside of your guest and use this. The client is currently limited to Debian-based systems.
 
Thanks.
Excuse my ignorance... By Virtual Disk, do you mean that the VM is installed to that disk? i.e. Installing the NextCloud server to the USB drive, instead of the local drive?
 
Herumakilo said:
By Virtual Disk, do you mean that the VM is installed to that disk? i.e. Installing the NextCloud server to the USB drive, instead of the local drive?
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Not the the os, but an additional disk from there, yes. This is the only way I know to get PBS to backup the contents when used in VM context (backup in PVE)
 
LnxBil said:
Not the the os, but an additional disk from there, yes. This is the only way I know to get PBS to backup the contents when used in VM context (backup in PVE)
Click to expand...
Thanks for your help, it took a couple of goes, but I finally understand.
My confusion was how to create a Virtual Disk, without creating the VM. Your help pointed my in the right direction, I think.
Create a thinpool on the node, which can then be assigned to the VM as a scsi, allowing it to be backed up with the VM.
 
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