Keeping a set of backups from a PBS about to be retired

[tomstephens89]

Hi all,

I am about to replace our long standing PBS with some new all flash hardware. Since there has been significant changes to our Proxmox VE cluster environment since this was installed, I want to start fresh and not perform any migration of the existing backups.

However, I do want to take few full 'point in time' backups from the old such as the last 3 monthly full sets, as well as a couple of the historic yearly for compliance reasons more than anything.

How would I go about doing this? I am thinking perhaps a USB HDD, then do a sync job from the existing datastore to a new datastore linked to the USB HDD. But I have 2 questions:

1. Would the sync job allow me to specify only certain point in time backups, rather than all in the groups for each VM?
2. How would I go about mounting this USB HDD on a new PBS if I needed to access and restore these historic archived backups?

Thanks

 

[fabian]

1. no, but you can sync into a new namespace, then prune that namespace, and then sync that to your second (external) datastore
2. basically - keep a copy of the datastore.cfg section, and then re-add it to the config when you want to access it on your new PBS (possibly adapting the mount path/..). patches to smooth such tasks are worked on, but not yet finalized.

 

[tomstephens89]

1. no, but you can sync into a new namespace, then prune that namespace, and then sync that to your second (external) datastore
2. basically - keep a copy of the datastore.cfg section, and then re-add it to the config when you want to access it on your new PBS (possibly adapting the mount path/..). patches to smooth such tasks are worked on, but not yet finalized.

Thanks.

1. Understood, sync into a clean datastore and then prune down to what we need. Sync that to a new datastore served by my external disks.
2. Could you give me a quick/dirty guide on how to do this, where is the datastore config, and upon mounting the disk in a new server, adjusting the mount path in said config, how do I restore that datastore into PBS?

Thanks

 

[fabian]

1. a namespace is enough, and actually a lot faster since it doesn't need to copy the chunks. as long as you limit the pruning to that namespace, the original namespace will remain unaffected.
2. just ensure it gets mounted (automatically on boot, if you want it to be permanent) and add the entry in datastore.cfg pointing at it. that's it. you might need to reconfigure some jobs that don't live in datastore.cfg.