Restoring Single Files/Directories from backup images

[mygeeknc]

I have the files that need to be restored from a backup and normally we do two sets of backups, one through Proxmox and one via another program to S3. The S3 backups did not contain the data needed so I'm thinking our only option to restore the directory is in the Proxmox vma backup.

My question is, is it possible to mount externally or internally the vma to access the files?

Thanks.

 

[term]

As far as I know, the best thing to do would be to create a new vmid, and run the restore from the command line to restore into that. Then copy your files out.

 

[mygeeknc]

Yea, that's what I ended up doing. It's taking a very long time to restore though.

 

[m.ardito]

Yea, that's what I ended up doing. It's taking a very long time to restore though.

see also
http://pve.proxmox.com/wiki/VMA#Command_line_utility

Marco

 

[term]

I did some more reading on this. In theory it could be done this way:

For a qcow2 image on non-lvm:

lzo -x backupname
vma extract filename targetdir
modprobe nbd max_part=63
qemu-nbd -c /dev/nbd0 image.img
mount /dev/nbd0p1 /mnt/image

Work with the mounted image on host, copy your files.

umount /mnt/image
killall qemu-nbd
rm image.img
rm extracted_vma_file_name.vma

It would be slick to add this option to the GUI - maybe add it to the backups screen as another button called "Mount Backup". The would have to be another button there to unmount it. I think the problem is that this method really only applies to qcow2 images. Raw images require different treatment, and it would also be different on LVM.

Sources:
http://pve.proxmox.com/wiki/VMA#Command_line_utility
http://alexeytorkhov.blogspot.com/2009/09/mounting-raw-and-qcow2-vm-disk-images.html