Restore single file without PBS?

[EpicLPer]

Heya, pretty short and probably dumb question but is there any way (or plan) to restore a single file from PVE without having to set up PBS?

I'm currently playing around with Proxmox VE and BS, tho I think I understood the Backup Server a bit wrong. My initial thought was to directly use a NFS share for backups, not to use the local disk first and then sending it to NFS, which for my homelab use case wouldn't be possible.
The sole reason for me to set up PBS even was to have single file restore capabilities which doesn't seem like it's possible the way I thought it would work (((So much for just winging things and not reading docs first properly)))

 

[spirit]

no, you need pbs.

if it's a homelab, you can install pbs directly on the same server than pve
https://pbs.proxmox.com/docs/installation.html#install-proxmox-backup-server-on-proxmox-ve

then create a pbs datastore on a nfs mountpoint

and configure pbs as localhost in your pve.

 

[Dunuin]

I'm currently playing around with Proxmox VE and BS, tho I think I understood the Backup Server a bit wrong. My initial thought was to directly use a NFS share for backups, not to use the local disk first and then sending it to NFS, which for my homelab use case wouldn't be possible.

The idea of PBS is to not use NFS at all but local SSD (or at least HDD+SSD) storage. But NFS works as long as the NFS server has a good IOPS performance.

The sole reason for me to set up PBS even was to have single file restore capabilities which doesn't seem like it's possible the way I thought it would work

Biggest selling point should be that your backups will only consume a fraction of the space once you keep multiple backups per VM, as PBS is supporting incremental backups and VZDump isn't.
How do you think it should work? You can download single files from your LXCs or even VM disks via the webUI when using PBS.

Heya, pretty short and probably dumb question but is there any way (or plan) to restore a single file from PVE without having to set up PBS?

Only the staff could answer this. But with so much work to do with PBS I would wonder if they spend the time on improving an inferior backup system that could better be used to improve PBS (and with it sell more subscriptions).

 

[EpicLPer]

Biggest selling point should be that your backups will only consume a fraction of the space once you keep multiple backups per VM, as PBS is supporting incremental backups and VZDump isn't.
How do you think it should work? You can download single files from your LXCs or even VM disks via the webUI when using PBS.

Oh right yeah, forgot about this when writing my post. This is also a huge reason why I wanted to use PBS.

 

[EpicLPer]

no, you need pbs.

if it's a homelab, you can install pbs directly on the same server than pve
https://pbs.proxmox.com/docs/installation.html#install-proxmox-backup-server-on-proxmox-ve

then create a pbs datastore on a nfs mountpoint

and configure pbs as localhost in your pve.

Thanks, I didn't know I had to do it like this and in my haste yesterday just created local datastores

Well, another issue now tho: I've set up a Datastore on my Synology which was rather fast and only took around a minute or so. However on my TrueNAS chunk generation alone is taking quite a lot of time already... not sure why. It's already taking ~3 minutes just to be at 14% by now.

 

[Dunuin]

Like said, PBS needs to write and read millions over millions of files. Chunk generstion alone is creating 65535 empty folders. If your TrueNAS is using HDDs without SSDs as special devices it will be slow as hell. With a HDD only able to do like 100 IOPS even cresting those empty folders will take 10-30 minutes.

 

[EpicLPer]

Like said, PBS needs to write and read millions over millions of files. Chunk generstion alone is creating 65535 empty folders. If your TrueNAS is using HDDs without SSDs as special devices it will be slow as hell. With a HDD only able to do like 100 IOPS even cresting those empty folders will take 10-30 minutes.

My Synology isn't using SSD cache either, that's why it confuses me a bit I'm aware it creates a ton of folders, tho it seemed a bit weird to me that despite my Synology not having any cache in between that it generated the chunks so much faster, 1 minute vs 30 minutes.

I've also created another thread about this now, which is probably a bit better to manage as this is getting a bit offtopic already
https://forum.proxmox.com/threads/truenas-scale-nfs-datastore-very-slow.144060/post-647983