Migration of VM to a new install of proxmox.

[bunker195]

Hi everyone - I'm a proxmox newbie and apologize if this has been asked and answered, but, I can't seem to find exactly what I'm looking for or perhaps don't know where to look or how to phase the search appropriately. From all of the posts I've read this community seems pretty willing to help out, so, I hope no one minds such a request.

The background of why I'm here:
I've gone down the Home Assistant rabbit hole and was running a bare metal version of HAOS - but, after an update messed up my entire z-wave configuration and trying to revert to a backup version didn't solve my issues and I spent a day adding my z-wave devices back in, I thought there must be a better way. Some research led to running it as a VM in proxmox with the ability to easily restore a working version of HA from a backup.

So, on a whim, I installed proxmox on an older workstation that I had sitting around 48 Core Dell 7920 which seemed like it would be plenty for any future projects and learning. It only had a single HD

Since I didn't really do any planning, I just set it up and got everything working.

I have set up daily backups of my HA VM to the local drive with the OS - obviously not ideal. I also managed to get a USB SDD mounted from the GUI and can create backups on it as well. I'm now a convert to Proxmox.


Now that I've had some time to think about my installation, I'd like to make some changes:

Step 1- Move to proxmox 9 since it just came out
Step 2- install proxmox on a ZFS RAID 1 configuration on the workstation.
Step 3- take a backup from the USB SSD and recreate my HA VM on the new install of PM 9.

I've gotten steps 1 & 2 complete
I now have PM9 running on the workstation with new drives in ZFS raid 1.
I still have the original drive with proxmox 8.4.6 installed.

Great, I thought - the rest should be easy. Just grab a recent backup from the USB HDD, restore it and good to go.

I'm sure this is easy for most of you, but, as a newbie to proxmox and linux, I'm having trouble getting this sorted out. I have found numerous posts that I think are talking about what I'm trying to do but are a bit too much in the weeds for my current level knowledge with proxmox.

In an ideal world, I've like to be able to do this from the GUI. I'm not affraid to use the CLI if needed though.

At this point I'm swapping out the HD's - I have the old drive with PM 8.4.6 running most of the time, but, when I think I might have found a way to get things working, I take that out and boot proxmox 9 from the Raid drives, then when whatever I tried doesn't work, I go back to the old installation so that home assistant is running while I'm try to figure out what to do next.

So, here's what I'm doing next - asking for help.

On the new proxmox installation I can see the disk with my backups as /dev/sdc with the ext4 partion /dev/sdc1. However, I can't see the backups I've created. I've tried lots of things but nothing has worked, so, I won't detail these attempts.

Can someone kindly help me out from here?

Even if nothging else, thanks so much for taking the time to read my longwinded issue.

Tom.

 

[Kurgan]

backups should show up in the GUI if the usb hard disk is set up properly in the new PVE installation.
The issue is that "properly" is not always simple. It's simple for a Linux expert of course.

Let me try to help you... On the new PVE host, do the following:

On the web interface, click on Datacenter, select Storage, press the "add" button on top, select "directory" then give it a name "restore" and a path "/restore" (that does not exist yet) and select the contents as "backup"

Click the "Add" button.

What you have done is that you created a directory on your local disk, named "/restore" and in that directory there is another directory named "dump", as you can see from this screenshot of the console:



Now you have to mount your usb disk to this directory. To do it, you need the console.

Before going on, connect your usb disk.

You will find that the usb disk has a name like /dev/sdc1 or something. You can find its name by using the command dmesg which will show a lot of information but in the end there will be information about the usb disk you just connected, something like this:



This shows you that the disk (in my case) is called "sda" (and its only partition is "sda1"). If you already have other non-nvme disks, it will be "sdc" probably (a and b being the two system disks; nvme disks use a different naming scheme).

Now you have to mount your usb disk into the "/restore" directory you created before with this command: (replace "sda1" with the correct disk name)

mount /dev/sda1 /restore

If you don't see any error, you can now check if it worked: go to the web gui, maybe reload it, and see if in the "restore" datastore contains the backups you made on the usb disk. (in this image there are none, but you should see them now)



BEWARE: backups MUST reside into the "dump" directory, so if the backups on the USB disk are NOT in a directory called "dump", you will not see them.

If you see them, you should now be able to restore them

When you are finished, unmount the usb disk:

umount /restore

And then you can eventually destroy the "restore" datastore from the web interface.

Hope this helps.

 

[bunker195]

Worked like a charm.

Thank you so much for taking the time for a thoughtful, detailed and educational reply!

I've messed around with linux here and there as well as other virtualization platforms but didn't really have a 'need' so nothing stuck. Since I'll be using proxmox for the foreseeable future, i'll undoubtedly amp up my learning going forward.

You are truly an expert!

PS - great screen name

 

[Kurgan]

I'm happy that it worked on the first try.

What's missing in the web UI (or maybe there is now but I have not found it) is a way to mount a disk with data already on it and preserve such data.

If you had a completely empty disk, not formatted, not partitioned, you could have added it as a backup image storage device from the web UI, and it would have been partitioned, formatted, and mounted (under /mnt/pve/somename) automatically.

But since you have an already partitioned and formatted disk, the web UI (as far as I know) does not allow you to just mount it (not formatting it, and not losing its content).

Or maybe it does now, I'm a long time linux sysadmin and it's easier for me to just use the console to do things instead of trying to learn the new web interface functions.

Screen name is from the movie Highlander (the original one from 1986). Had it as a nickname since that time, my schoolmates gave it to me because "you are ugly like the Kurgan". I was 16 then. Good times.

 

[bunker195]

you should have just put safety pins in your neck and gone with it!
Now that my migration is done, I found what seems to be a really good linux tutorial and have started working my way through that. The lawn can wait...

 

[powersupport]

The issue is likely because the USB SSD hasn’t been added as a storage location in Proxmox yet. Once it’s mounted and added under Datacenter → Storage, your backups will appear in the GUI and be ready for restore.