Move Tape Library Hardware from one PBS to another, best practice?

Jul 31, 2023
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Hi everyone, I plan to replace the hardware on a Proxmox Backup Server because the hardware is outdated. However, a tape library is also connected to this PBS, which will not be replaced but is supposed to be moved from the old server to the new one—and all backups on the tape are to be preserved.

For the backups on the ZFS datastore, the migration is pretty straightforward—just a backup-copy job. But with the tape library, things could get more complicated.

If I understand correctly, you can have the backup catalog from the tape library re-imported onto the new PBS, for example, if the PBS completely fails. But that can take days, right? What’s the preferred approach if the old PBS is still available? Is it possible to cleanly migrate the “database” or something similar to the new PBS? Or should you always have the catalog re-imported?


Thank you in advance
 
assuming that the ids will be the same (e.g from the individual drives/changers) you could try to copy /var/lib/proxmox-backup/tape from the old to the new installation
this contains the inventory + chunk logs/indexes for the individual tapes