Migrating due to hardware problems

bunk3m

Member
Feb 22, 2023
11
4
8
In front of my computer in Canada
[newbie alert]

Hello,

I apologize in advance for what might be a number of stupid questions.

I've been having a problem with intermittent shutdown of my home PBS server. Link to hardware issue discussion.

Given that I have PBS running on old hardware, and it doesn't make sense to spend money and time to find which bit of hardware is failing, I've decided to replace with a newer tower.

The old hardware will run anywhere from 2 min to 16 hrs so trying to migrate/sync boot disk might work or might not work. I want to physically move the data drives to the new hardware. The data drives are all ZFS and I believe the boot disk is ZFS.

I know this is a potential recipe for disaster but wanted to ask if it is possible to just move the drives to the newer tower? If it were identical hardware, I assume it would work. In this case, it is newer hardware but a newer generation Intel x64 processor.

If this is a really bad idea, then is the migration process like this: boot the old hardware long enough to export the ZFS data pools, move the data disks, install pbs on the new hardware, copy the /etc/proxmox-backup from old to the new hardware, restart new hardware, and re-import the zfs data disks? Is this possible?

Thanks in advance for any guidance.
 
Make fresh install of PBS on new Hardware. Install PBS on an own drive and make eversything ready -updates, network etc.
After that, connect the old drives. Manual step needed: auto-mount the drives. if drives appear under the old mountpoint, you can add them as existing datastore.