Sorry if I missed posts about this and/or in the documentation.
Let me preface with the fact that I have thoroughly appreciated the proxmox stack, and am a big fan, and like too many, I've not gone through all the docs in detail. So this is truly meant to be a constructive suggestion, not a rant or complaint.
This is about storage, and particularly when PBS server is involved, and my own personal learning curve (which has been jagged, ha!).
Short version:
If the storage icons in the Proxmox node ve interface were differentiated, it would help A LOT for me personally.
Everything shows as a disk, and yet in reality (I think!), some are real and local, some are real but external / mounted (like nfs and the like), and many (for me now) are actually just 'views' into a particular slice of PBS. With my somewhat complicated multi-site, multi-function/scope (internal/external, public, etc) environment, seeing a long line of 'storage line items' in the node browser is mind-numbing.
Icons that differentiated would make all that confusion turn into clarity, it seems to me, and could likely be done fairly easily.
They would let you see in an instant which of those potential things is a true PBS view, a true piece of disk, a true mount, etc, etc.
Longer version
This morning I went to restore some lxc's from one node to another.
In the process, I had to add a remote PBS target and did so.
Then I did my first backups against it, which worked fine as expected.
But then, trying to find them on the proxmox node, to do a restore, turned into a wild goose chase.
I have about 14 storage things defined, and it's entirely unclear and lost to me now which are 'real' (like a local USB disk), and which are a PBS target (which is also not just the 'entire' datastore of the PBS, but a scoped sliver of it), or an nfs mount, etc.
I've done the usual, which is to try to name things like blah_nfs_location_or_service, etc, etc. but it's turned into a redundant overlapping pile of names due to the fact that I'm doing backups from multiple locations / storing to multiple / etc. So the 'locations' are confusing enough but then having to add a datastore / service / view label makes it even more comical.
So my names have become sextuplets and such, and browsing among those line items doesn't help much, as there are no notes or the like.
So I've been befuddled numerous times about what I was looking at (especially as I evolved my backup architecture over time) and whether it was 'real' or 'virtual' or what...
I've gone through a few iterations of backups (originally pre PBS, now deep in PBS, etc), and have 2 remote locations, each with some local external / USB storage but then also external NAS, and a wireguard between, so doing backups across that to the remote locations, etc.
I've gotten tangled up multiple times on my journey to have a nice clean logical layout that's easily navigated / understood.
I'm using namespaces in PBS for the two locations, etc.
So my constructive suggestion is simply this:
1) add a descriptor to those that shows up in the summary when they are selected (but this feels like it might be a bigger thing to do, and still would require you to walk through each item to see that, unless it were a hover or something)
2) when rendering the little disk icon, just modify that based on the type of actual item; I think the categories would be something like those in the menu when you create storage, but most helpful would simply be
-physical (maybe that's the disk icon; after all, the entire section is already labeled 'storage', so having them all show up as a disk icon doesn't help much)
-PBS 'view' (because I think that's what they really are- a slice of the PBS datastore. So this morning I had lost track of that- I kept browsing through my various PBS named datastores in the proxmox node (some left over from prior art, etc), and could see last night's / this morning's backups, but not the 2-3 brand new ones that I 'could' see in the pbs server backup browsing itself)
-remote mount (this would help a lot to know that yes, this storage is not physically attached to this node)
Anyway- just my two cents on what might be a small change but would be a HUGE help for anybody navigating those storage line items, it seems to me.
If I've completely missed something and am way off base, please be gentle.
Merry Christmas.
Let me preface with the fact that I have thoroughly appreciated the proxmox stack, and am a big fan, and like too many, I've not gone through all the docs in detail. So this is truly meant to be a constructive suggestion, not a rant or complaint.
This is about storage, and particularly when PBS server is involved, and my own personal learning curve (which has been jagged, ha!).
Short version:
If the storage icons in the Proxmox node ve interface were differentiated, it would help A LOT for me personally.
Everything shows as a disk, and yet in reality (I think!), some are real and local, some are real but external / mounted (like nfs and the like), and many (for me now) are actually just 'views' into a particular slice of PBS. With my somewhat complicated multi-site, multi-function/scope (internal/external, public, etc) environment, seeing a long line of 'storage line items' in the node browser is mind-numbing.
Icons that differentiated would make all that confusion turn into clarity, it seems to me, and could likely be done fairly easily.
They would let you see in an instant which of those potential things is a true PBS view, a true piece of disk, a true mount, etc, etc.
Longer version
This morning I went to restore some lxc's from one node to another.
In the process, I had to add a remote PBS target and did so.
Then I did my first backups against it, which worked fine as expected.
But then, trying to find them on the proxmox node, to do a restore, turned into a wild goose chase.
I have about 14 storage things defined, and it's entirely unclear and lost to me now which are 'real' (like a local USB disk), and which are a PBS target (which is also not just the 'entire' datastore of the PBS, but a scoped sliver of it), or an nfs mount, etc.
I've done the usual, which is to try to name things like blah_nfs_location_or_service, etc, etc. but it's turned into a redundant overlapping pile of names due to the fact that I'm doing backups from multiple locations / storing to multiple / etc. So the 'locations' are confusing enough but then having to add a datastore / service / view label makes it even more comical.
So my names have become sextuplets and such, and browsing among those line items doesn't help much, as there are no notes or the like.
So I've been befuddled numerous times about what I was looking at (especially as I evolved my backup architecture over time) and whether it was 'real' or 'virtual' or what...
I've gone through a few iterations of backups (originally pre PBS, now deep in PBS, etc), and have 2 remote locations, each with some local external / USB storage but then also external NAS, and a wireguard between, so doing backups across that to the remote locations, etc.
I've gotten tangled up multiple times on my journey to have a nice clean logical layout that's easily navigated / understood.
I'm using namespaces in PBS for the two locations, etc.
So my constructive suggestion is simply this:
1) add a descriptor to those that shows up in the summary when they are selected (but this feels like it might be a bigger thing to do, and still would require you to walk through each item to see that, unless it were a hover or something)
2) when rendering the little disk icon, just modify that based on the type of actual item; I think the categories would be something like those in the menu when you create storage, but most helpful would simply be
-physical (maybe that's the disk icon; after all, the entire section is already labeled 'storage', so having them all show up as a disk icon doesn't help much)
-PBS 'view' (because I think that's what they really are- a slice of the PBS datastore. So this morning I had lost track of that- I kept browsing through my various PBS named datastores in the proxmox node (some left over from prior art, etc), and could see last night's / this morning's backups, but not the 2-3 brand new ones that I 'could' see in the pbs server backup browsing itself)
-remote mount (this would help a lot to know that yes, this storage is not physically attached to this node)
Anyway- just my two cents on what might be a small change but would be a HUGE help for anybody navigating those storage line items, it seems to me.
If I've completely missed something and am way off base, please be gentle.
Merry Christmas.