Migrating PBS to new server, re-adding datastore?

the block

New Member
Jan 20, 2024
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When I initially set up PVE and PBS, I did so on the same system, and PBS was just a VM running within PVE. I wanted to separate them into two physical systems to make restores easier if my PVE system did actually crash.

I decided to move my PBS server to my Synology NAS and run it in Virtual Machine Manager. I didn't really see a clear cut way to move the server over to the Synology, so I built a new PBS VM on the Synology NAS and am currently in the process of configuring it.

I'd like to switch over to using the new PBS server to backup the same data the original PBS server was backing up to the original datastore (a NFS mounted folder, living on the NAS).

I've tried to re-add the datastore on the new PBS server but when I do I get "unable to create chunk store 'Synology-NFS' subdir "/mnt/backups/.chunks" - EEXIST: File exists". It's seeing the correct folder, but because there's already a .chunks folder that the original PBS folder was backing up to, it doesn't want to use it.

Is there a way to easily start using the new PBS server to back up to the existing .chunks folder, and retain all that info? I've been reading a bit about Remotes and sync functionality, but I'm not sure if that's really the path to take for a full migration, as I'm not just looking to use a second PBS server in tandem. Once this is working with the new PBS server, I'm shutting down and deleting the old one.

If there's no good way to do what I'm trying to do, I suppose I could just delete the existing .chunks folder and everything inside and start fresh, though I was hoping there was a way to avoid doing that.

Thanks in advance.
 
I've tried to re-add the datastore on the new PBS server but when I do I get "unable to create chunk store 'Synology-NFS' subdir "/mnt/backups/.chunks" - EEXIST: File exists". It's seeing the correct folder, but because there's already a .chunks folder that the original PBS folder was backing up to, it doesn't want to use it.
currently if you want to reuse the datastore, you'd have to edit the config file (/etc/proxmox-backup/datastore.cfg) manually otherwise the api will try to recreate it (as you saw)

AFAIK there is a plan to make that more user friendly and simply let it reuse a datastore if it detects one
 
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currently if you want to reuse the datastore, you'd have to edit the config file (/etc/proxmox-backup/datastore.cfg) manually otherwise the api will try to recreate it (as you saw)

AFAIK there is a plan to make that more user friendly and simply let it reuse a datastore if it detects one
Thank you!
 

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