Proxmox live restore + snapshot

[cocloud]

Hi everyone,

I'm currently testing Live Restore on Proxmox for some production VMs that serve as mail and hosting servers (cPanel-based).
During the restore process, I noticed something interesting and I'd love to hear your thoughts:

Let’s say the system is restoring a VM, and meanwhile some services (like Exim, Dovecot, Apache) are generating or modifying files (mail logs, MDBOX, SSL certs, etc). If one of those files gets created or modified before its original version is restored, what happens?

Will the restored version override the live-written one? Or does Proxmox handle this gracefully?

I’m particularly worried about user email loss — in my last test with a client site hosted via https://www.colombiacloud.co, the restore took ~8 hours and a few mailbox activities seemed to disappear (even though most of the system was working in under 1 hour thanks to Live Restore).

Any insights or best practices? Do you guys pause mail services during Live Restore or rely on post-restore syncs?

Thanks in advance!

 

[fba]

Hi,
assuming you're referring to the live restore when using a PBS, the process is explained here: https://pve.proxmox.com/pve-docs/chapter-vzdump.html#_live_restore
In short: anything the vm needs asap is restored asap, in non-consecutive order. The restore can not overwrite newer data with some from the backup therefore. The disk performance of the vm will be slower than expected during the restore.