Install USB hard drive for backups

[mathewb]

Hi there if I was to install a USB hard drive and put all of my backups on to it. Can I move that hard drive onto another proxmox server to restore the backups to it. How do I mount the hard drive onto the proxmox server

 

[Dunuin]

You can manually mount (CLI) the HDD somewhere, create a storage of type "directory" with content type "vzdump" pointing to that mountpoint and create or restore Backups. Shouldn't be a problem to move the drive between hosts to store/restore backups. Just keep in mind not to use automated backups so backups woudn't be written to the unmounted mointpoint which would result in everything be written to your system drive.

 

[mathewb]

how do you manually mount hard drives on proxmox

 

[Dunuin]

That depends on your filesystem. Its the same as with every Debian/Ubuntu.

-create a dir to work as a mountpoint (mkdir /media/usbhdd)
-make it owned by root (chown root:root /media/usbhdd) if created as non-root user
-if you got a new empty usb hdd, partition it with the tool of your choice (fdisk/parted/sgdisk) and format it (for example mkfs.ext4 /dev/sdX1)
-mount that usb hdd to the mountpoint created earlier (mount -t ext4 /dev/sdX1 /media/usbhdd)
-use Proxmox GUI to add the new directory storage

and if you want to unplug the drive:
-disable the directory storage so proxmox doesn'T try to access it
-unmount the drive umount /media/usbhdd

 

[mike2012]

2. posibility would be to mount the usb drive as zfs.

Than you can use zpool import / export to manage your usb datastore.

I am using 2 scripts to mount/dismount 2 external usb drives as offline datastore