.in-use File, Multiple Connections, DR Testing.

M

Mike_Scholes

New Member
Proxmox Subscriber
Jan 13, 2026
22
2
3
Hi all.

I'm looking to setup another PBS in a separate location purely to test restores in a DR scenario from our S3 backup. When I try to connect another PBS to the same bucket I get an error, as expected, saying the bucket is in use. I could connect my remote test system and select overwrite in use marker but what are the implications to the existing PBS that needs to carry on unaffected? On my test system I deleted the .in-use file and everything carried on without problems.
 
No, what you are doing will lead to data loss if the PBS servers are not in sync, GC may then delete chunks via one instance which are still in use by the other insance. You cannot operate 2 PBS instances on the same s3 datastore backend. The in-use marker is there exactly to protect from this.
 
Thanks, I assumed this so I would not attempt to do anything to alter data from both servers. Would simply restoring a vm on a remote server alter data in the S3 datastore? That's all I need to do, no verifies, no prunes, no GC, no backups, just restores. I'm not sure anything gets written to a datastore just restoring a VM?
 
Last edited:
Restores will not alter any data on the s3 backend, no. What might work is to use a different access key on the "read-only" instance, and limit it's token permissions to list and read only. by that you would be protected from accidental deletions/overwrites. But do note that we do not explicitly test for such an usecase, so your might run into unexpected behavior with such a setup.

Edit: further this would not perform any automatic state syncs between the PBS instances, a regular s3-refresh might help to keep the read only PBS instance in sync with the S3 backend.
 
Last edited:
You must log in or register to reply here.
Top Bottom
Back