Rotate removable HDD

[ThonyJ]

I have two USB hard drives and want to use them so I have one offline and one online and then after a while switch them so the one that was offline becomes online and vise versa.

Is there a way to have same datastore for both disks?

Currently I have to datastores - BackupSSD1 for the first disk and BackupSSD2 for the second disk.
When I switch disk from disk 1 to disk 2 I unmount BackupSSD1 remove the disk, and attache disk 2. Then I store disk 1 in another location.
When it has gone some time and I want to switch back I unmount BackupSSD2, remove disk 2 and attache disk1.

In PVE I have two backup jobs - one for each datastore. I want to have only one backup job.

 

[news]

Why? The Proxmox Backup Server store its Data in approx 4 M Chunks over all Backup that was made so far.

So you can use a 2nd Proxmox Backup Server to pull the Backupdata from the 1st Proxmox Backup Server and power of this device.
By a old PC, 2 - 4 Threads, 3.5 GHz cpu clockspeed and with NVMe/ SSD for the Proxmox Backup Server and setup a ZFS Datapool with 2x SDD over ZFS mirror VDEV.

 

[ThonyJ]

Why? The Proxmox Backup Server store its Data in approx 4 M Chunks over all Backup that was made so far.

So you can use a 2nd Proxmox Backup Server to pull the Backupdata from the 1st Proxmox Backup Server and power of this device.
By a old PC, 2 - 4 Threads, 3.5 GHz cpu clockspeed and with NVMe/ SSD for the Proxmox Backup Server and setup a ZFS Datapool with 2x SDD over ZFS mirror VDEV.

Thank you for your suggestion.

What I want to accomplish is to have one backup that are on site (in my case at home). One backup that are off site (in my case a vaccation hose a couple of miles from home). One backup that are offline and stored at a third place.

I am new to Proxmox. I have been working with VMware for around 20 years both at work and in my homelab. But now when VMware isn't free anymore I thought I try Proxmox instead in my homelab.

 

[GunnarTH]

Hi there

I've the same issue. I want to rotate few external drives on a regular basis to keep on off-site, out of online reach. I've just recently installed PBS server for testing and backups are running fine. All backups go on to a ZFS with few SATA drives and then I've one external datastore that is being synced once every 24h.

If I remove the drive, put in maintainace mode, unmount and then mount the new drive the sync fails. Complaining about missing .chunks folder, complaing about bunch of missing VMs and nothing works. That is after I worked around the UUID issue.

What is the meaning of removable datastore in the proxmox config if this cant be accomplished? Is someone out there that knows how to re-initialize the external datastore so it just sync everything from scratch? I'm hoping there is a simple task instead of me needing to remove the datastore and reconfigure every time I switch drives?

I plan to have the second PBS far away as suggested above but that is not a solution to have a real offline backup that we can move around and place whereever.

Thank you!

 

[ThonyJ]

I belive I solved my issue with removabla datastore. I now backup to my NAS and then have a sync job on each removable datastore that pulls from the NAS datastore.

I also exprienced what GunnarTH says about something missing on the source datastore (the NAS datastore). When I looked at the snapshots on the NAS datastore I saw that it was some activity on one snapshot (maybe it had not finished correctly). I had a more resent snapshot so I removed the one that had not finished. Then run the sync job again an it run with no error.