Old QCOW2 disk with alot of snapshots

[Aron Dijkstra]

Hi, i have a small question, i have inherited a very old proxmox system, and one server has alot of snapshots and they are big.... 4TB but the server is only 500GB. And i dont trust deleting them without a goooooood backup...


Is there a way to copy the disk to a new disk with all the snapshots included?

 

[Onslow]

Hi. E.g. shutdowning the server and cloning the disk(s) with Clonezilla.

 

[Kingneutron]

There is a non-zero chance that deleting a chain of snapshots will break things.

I would also do an in-vm backup of the current disk state (bare metal) in case you need to restore it like a physical box. Veeam free agent is good for this if the guest is Windows, otherwise for Linux look into Relax and Recover (REAR)

In fact now that I think about it, you might want to do ^^ and restore the "cleaned up" VM without snapshots onto another server FIRST, and make sure it boots before you go deleting snapshots on the original. This will also minimize your downtime. If/when it boots do a clean backup to PBS or similar before declaring it healthy and letting it run.

https://search.brave.com/search?q=p...summary=1&conversation=ec979768922f1bf3e1773c

 

[Aron Dijkstra]

Yes, i understand... i will try to do een veaam backup first. i thought it also supported Linux?

 

[Kingneutron]

I was using veeam to backup PVE 7 host for a while but it broke with a kernel update and wasn't fixed for months, YMMV