Need help reinstalling proxmox and preserving configuration

[nick793]

Hi, is there a consensus on the best way to do a fresh, clean install of proxmox while preserving VM zvols/configurations? I have a 600GB ZFS RAID10 rpool with 3 VM zvols and a few ISOs I want to preserve. I also have a secondary zpool called "nas" that has a few TB of free space.

In the GUI, proxmox thinks that this is only for VM/CT disks and there doesn't seem to be a way to add it as a backup target.

Is there a safe way to blow away my existing rpool, while saving:

- VM disks (raw zvols)
- VM configurations
- custom configuration files such as smartd.conf, vdev_id.conf, postfix configuration, etc
- files in my home folder

The best idea I've had so far is to manually copy these files on the cmd line with rsync to my "nas" zpool and then on a fresh install move them back into place. I don't want to miss anything important though.

Background:
I recently installed proxmox 6.3 just before 6.4 dropped. Did an apt dist-upgrade and all seemed fine.

Unfortunately, today on a reboot and because of a bad SATA cable, my rpool degraded. One drive was throwing checksum errors so I powered down and swapped the cable. All was well until reboot.

At this point, I got a grub rescue prompt. Used the USB installer in debug mode and did a zpool import -f rpool (forgot -N -R). Did a zpool scrub and errors repaired! Now I'm able to boot.

After successful boot, unfortunately the GUI wouldn't load and pveproxy wouldn't start. I tried several different steps here and at one point decided to reinstall all of the pve core packages with:

 apt install --reinstall $(apt list --installed | grep pve | sed 's/\/.*$//g')

Eventually the only way I was able to get the GUI to come back up and get pveproxy to start was to delete "ipv6.disable=1" from the kernel cmdline in /etc/default/grub.

At this point, I'm getting enough weirdness with the system at boot that I don't feel confident in the stability of this install going forward and want to do a fresh, clean install to get back to a known good state.

 

[bobmc]

I'm in a similar position but I don't know of any specific recommendations. Because of the different configuration options, I suspect there can only be guidelines and they are probably similar to what you are proposing - backup your VM's and any customisations, re-install and restore.

If you create a zfs dataset on your 'nas' pool, you should be able to add that as a 'directory' for backups (VZDump files)

best of luck

 

[Dunuin]

Is that "nas" pool build upon physical disks? In that case you can run zpool export nas to export that pool als later use zpool import nas to import it on the new proxmox install. You won't be able to export until you delete your zfs storage becasue otherwise proxmox will try to import it as soon as you export it. And you will need to manually create a new zfs storage after import to tell proxmox to use it.

For VMs its the easiest way to just create a backup using the GUI and store them on a USB disk or NAS and import them on the new proxmox.

For all the custom linux configs you could tar-gz them onto a external storage.