strange issue trying to clone the boot disk

[cholzer]

My boot disk is a single WD Red SN700 250GB

Now that I have everything setup and ocnfigured, I'd like to create a 1:1 clone of my boot disk.
For that purpose I bought a 2nd WD Red SN700 250GB

So I though I just put both in a 2nd system, boot the minitool partition wizard from the thumb drive and simply clone the disk.

But that cloned disk isnt working correctly. When I boot Proxmox with that drive then Proxmox does not find the ZFS pool storage.
If I put the other ssd into the system then everything works just fine.

Anyone an idea why the cloned drive isnt working in my case?

 

[mariol]

Now that I have everything setup and ocnfigured, I'd like to create a 1:1 clone of my boot disk.
For that purpose I bought a 2nd WD Red SN700 250GB

What is your goal with it, or what do you want to achieve with it?

 

[cholzer]

What is your goal with it, or what do you want to achieve with it?

In case that the current SSD dies, I want to be able to just throw in the clone to get the system back up in a matter of minutes.

I am honestly scared of doing a clean Proxmox install and then trying to manually restore the config (I have also exported the required config files/folders as described on the forums).

I really hope that PVE will eventually get a simple backup/restore function like TrueNas Core provides, where after a clean install I just have to import a single config backupfile to restore the system.

 

[mariol]

In case that the current SSD dies, I want to be able to just throw in the clone to get the system back up in a matter of minutes.

There are more elegant options. You could use a raid. Hardware Raid or a ZFS raid.

I am honestly scared of doing a clean Proxmox install and then trying to manually restore the config (I have also exported the required config files/folders as described on the forums).

It is best to back up the entire /etc and /root so that you have everything you need for a new installation. Individual files can then be retrieved from the backup.
The whole thing is just a matter of finding out what you REALLY need and storing it in the new setup. For example the network configuration under "/etc/network/interfaces", or VM-configs under "/etc/pve/qemu-server".

If you really would like to clone the whole disk 1:1, you can use dd.

 

[cholzer]

You could use a raid.

Coming from ESXi that seemed overkill to me when I built the system as on the boot disk I only have the OS/PVE. no VMs, no LXC, no nothing .

The pool where VMs/LXC are hosted is a 4wide Z1 - with daily backups to an external NAS. I do take that quite seriously.

What I did not quite understand/consider at the time I built the system was the process of restoring PVE after a boot disk fault. So while I do have the required files backed up (to an external NAS by a cron job using the script found in the forum), I want an addional resuce plan in the form of that cloned drive.

I will take a look at doing that with DD in a safe way.

I really hope that PVE will get a "restore from backup" solution in the near future. This seems to be one of the most wanted features.

Thank you for speedy replies!