[SOLVED] Moving vm Backup to an other Datastore

[sruehl]

Hi everybody,

I made a mistake when I was calculating needed diskspace of a Datastore…
I included too many Vms in a backup schedule storing them in one specific datastore.
Since increasing diskspace for the datastore is not an option any more (already at 80TB size) I would like to move the backups of some larger machines to an other datastore while keeping the backup history of these machines.

Fully moving a datastore is as far as I know, not much of a problem:
- Create new datastore
- rsync data under mnt/datastore/OLDDATASTORE to mnt/datastore/NEWDATASTORE
- Mount newdatastore in PVE
- change Backup Job to store the Backups in NEWDATASTORE
Since Backup recognises the VM ID it continues the backups under the new datastore making them accessible for full- and filelevel restore. (Haven’t tested it jet but read about it in some articles on the net)

But what if I just want to move all the backups of a specific VM to a new Datastore? How can I decide, which Chunks (under .chunks) belong to a certain maschine?

Or is this a completely wrong approach?

Thanks for your help,


Stefan

 

[dylanw]

Hi Stefan,

You can add a remote [1] with 'localhost' as the host name, then pull specific backups from one datatstore to another on a local machine.

[1] https://pbs.proxmox.com/docs/managing-remotes.html

 

[sruehl]

Hi Dylan,
works perfect! Thanks a lot!

Short summery to others:
Choosing a specific VM to move to the VM to an other Datastore is currently (PBS 2.1-2) not available in the GUI. You have to change an existing SYNC Job using the shell:
# proxmox-backup-manager sync-job update ID --group-filter group:vm/100
where ID is the sync job ID you get when listing sync jobs using
# proxmox-backup-manager sync-job list

Best regards,
Stefan

 

[dylanw]

Great to hear it, and thanks for adding the guide! I should have thought to mention the 'group-filters' [1] in my answer, but good that you found it
Note that you can also create a new sync job with the group filter enabled, rather than altering an existing one:

proxmox-backup-manager sync-job create <ID> --group-filter group:vm/100 --remote <remote> --remote-store <from-datastore> --store <to-datastore>

where '<remote>' refers to the remote you configured with 'localhost'.

Would you also mind marking the thread as "Solved" so that others with the same issue can find a solution easier?

[1] https://pbs.proxmox.com/docs/managing-remotes.html#sync-jobs

 

[ctsde_markus]

Fully moving a datastore is as far as I know, not much of a problem:

I recently tried exactly that, but it didn't work as expected

- Create new datastore
- rsync data under mnt/datastore/OLDDATASTORE to mnt/datastore/NEWDATASTORE
- Mount newdatastore in PVE

This is where i got an error message telling me, that it couldn't create a subdirectory (yeah, because they were all there!).

Or is this a completely wrong approach?

Kind of. At least i had no luck trying this:

mkdir /mnt/stor01-pbs
mount -t nfs nas01:/pbs /mnt/stor01-pbs

Then i added this directory as a Datastore in the GUI, it created the subdirectories and everything was OK. Until i realized the difference in the mountpoint and the actual hostname of my NFS storage. No big deal, i thought and i removed the datastore in the GUI.

After that i corrected the directory name:

umount /mnt/stor01-pbs
mv /mnt/stor01-pbs /mnt/nas01-pbs
mount -t nas01:/pbs /mnt/nas01-pbs

And when i re-added the new directory as a datastore i got the error message. I can't remember the exact wording but it told me, that it couldn't create a subdirectory and it didn't add the datastore.

How are we supposed to recover from such a situation? Can i somehow add an existing directory structure to a newly created PBS?

Thanks
Markus

 

[dylanw]

And when i re-added the new directory as a datastore i got the error message. I can't remember the exact wording but it told me, that it couldn't create a subdirectory and it didn't add the datastore.

How are we supposed to recover from such a situation? Can i somehow add an existing directory structure to a newly created PBS?

I guess the problem is that the old datastore files are still in the nfs directory: nas01:/pbs.
Was there any backup data on this datastore? If not, you could delete all the files from the directory (note the hidden .lock file and .chunks directory), the create a new datastore at the path.

Note that a simpler solution than copying with rsync is proposed and accepted in this thread.

 

[ctsde_markus]

I guess the problem is that the old datastore files are still in the nfs directory: nas01:/pbs.
Was there any backup data on this datastore? If not, you could delete all the files from the directory (note the hidden .lock file and .chunks directory), the create a new datastore at the path.

Note that a simpler solution than copying with rsync is proposed and accepted in this thread.

Yes, thanks. I saw that but what if there is a total desaster in a DC? All that's left is a USB drive with the contents of last week's PBS Datastore and i need to start completely with new hardware for the whole DC.

I cannot import the contents of this offline backup to a new PBS?

Thanks
Markus

 

[Kosh]

I have the same problem as ctsde_markus
reinstalled pbs it is on sdb and the datastore was on sda there are archival copies of vm
how to connect old datastore?

 

[dylanw]

The original question detailed moving the contents of an active datastore safely. If I understand correctly, the topic of discussion is now reattaching an old datastore to a new PBS instance.

For this, you could just mount the drive with the datastore to the new (or freshly reinstalled) system, and manually add an entry in the file /etc/proxmox-backup/datastore.cfg for it, with the following contents:

datastore: <DATASTORE-NAME>
    path /path/to/datastore

where '/path/to/datastore' is the location of the datastore on the mounted drive.

 

[ctsde_markus]

The original question detailed moving the contents of an active datastore safely. If I understand correctly, the topic of discussion is now reattaching an old datastore to a new PBS instance.

For this, you could just mount the drive with the datastore to the new (or freshly reinstalled) system, and manually add an entry in the file /etc/proxmox-backup/datastore.cfg for it, with the following contents:

datastore: <DATASTORE-NAME>
    path /path/to/datastore

where '/path/to/datastore' is the location of the datastore on the mounted drive.

Thanks!

That's what i was searching for. It's a bit weird to get an error message when adding an already "used" directory structure rather than the GUI checking and acting accordingly.

Can someone take this as a "nice to have" feature request?

Thanks a lot!
Markus

 

[Kosh]

The original question detailed moving the contents of an active datastore safely. If I understand correctly, the topic of discussion is now reattaching an old datastore to a new PBS instance.

For this, you could just mount the drive with the datastore to the new (or freshly reinstalled) system, and manually add an entry in the file /etc/proxmox-backup/datastore.cfg for it, with the following contents:

datastore: <DATASTORE-NAME>
    path /path/to/datastore

where '/path/to/datastore' is the location of the datastore on the mounted drive.

thanks i did it

 

[dylanw]

Can someone take this as a "nice to have" feature request?

Feel free to open up an enhancement request at our bug tracker: https://bugzilla.proxmox.com/