Restore VMs and LXCs on a new PVE installation

mariorossi78

New Member
Oct 20, 2025
2
0
1
Hello. I would like to suggest a possible improvement for VMs and LXCs restoration. I have a home server with 3 SATA III 3.5 HDDs, 1 SATA III 2.5 HDD, 2 SATA III 2.5 SSDs, and 1 M.2 SATA III SSD. I installed the PVE on the M.2 SSD and a couple of VMs and LXCs on the other storage. Last week, my M.2 SSD died and I used one of the empty storage to install a new instance of PVE. With some tricks, I was able to connect all the previous storage and volumes to the new PVE installation, but because the .conf files of all of my VMs and LXCs were on the dead storage, I tried to create new VMs and LXCs that linked the relative files saved on the other storage. Unfortunately, the new VMs and LXCs didn't start. To avoid the same problems in the future, I would like to suggest the following:
  • Improve the disks and volumes management to make it simple and GUI-friendly to connect previous storages/volumes to a new PVE installation.
  • Save the .conf files of any VM and LXC on the same storage where the VMs and LXCs are saved, so after the installation on a new PVE you can recreate all the VMs and LXCs without the needed to backup the .conf files in advance.
Thanks.
 
For feature requests http://bugzilla.proxmox.com would be the right place.

The backup/restore function already contains the configs so I'm not sure such function is really needed. It's more of an edge case because ususlly you should have one backup available.
Another issue I see is that the vm/lxc configuration is shared between the nodes of a cluster ( /etc/pve is a kind of pseudo filesystem mapping the configuration database to config files which are replicated to all nodes) . Since the storage of the vms/lxcs doesn't need to be a "shared storage" it would mean to have the configs in two places, which Light be a bit missleading.

I'm not a staff member though, maybe one of them has some insights whether such a feature could be implemented and whether it's worth it.
 
Thanks for your replay. Probably my is a case-limit, I had the VMs/LXCs backups but I did them few days berfore and in the minetime the states of the VMs changed (I had one VMs with lightning network node) and I couldn't used the backup to restore them.

p.s. Can I transer the thread to http://bugzilla.proxmox.com o I have to open a new one?