vzdump file format

[tlphipps]

First off, I absolutely LOVE the new GUI-based backup system in Proxmox VE 1.0. It makes creating backups a breeze! And the backups work great with LVM snapshots not requiring any downtime. Restores of both containers and full-virtuals have worked flawlessly too.

My question is about the file format used for the .tar files. I've been unable to get any other tools (besides vzdump) to read these files. I was hoping to be able to open these .tar files with other tools to prove that the backups can be taken to other systems. But so far, that does not appear to be the case. Can vzdump backups only be restored on a Proxmox VE system using vzdump --restore?

 

[dietmar]

Tar is a standard format, there are plenty of tools which supports tar files. Whats the problem?

- Dietmar

 

[tom]

First off, I absolutely LOVE the new GUI-based backup system in Proxmox VE 1.0. It makes creating backups a breeze! And the backups work great with LVM snapshots not requiring any downtime. Restores of both containers and full-virtuals have worked flawlessly too.

My question is about the file format used for the .tar files. I've been unable to get any other tools (besides vzdump) to read these files. I was hoping to be able to open these .tar files with other tools to prove that the backups can be taken to other systems. But so far, that does not appear to be the case. Can vzdump backups only be restored on a Proxmox VE system using vzdump --restore?

tar is standard on all Linux/Unix systems. if your are on windows box you can use 7zip to extract the files (just one example)

 

[tlphipps]

I tried 7-zip on Vista and it wouldn't open the file.

So then I tried doing a tar --list on the proxmox host and it just sits there and never lists anything. I left it 'running' for 30 minutes and never got a single file listed.

I tried a 500MB openvz backup as well as a 9GB KVM backup.

I am able to restore these files just fine using vzdump.

 

[tom]

I tried 7-zip on Vista and it wouldn't open the file.

So then I tried doing a tar --list on the proxmox host and it just sits there and never lists anything. I left it 'running' for 30 minutes and never got a single file listed.

I tried a 500MB openvz backup as well as a 9GB KVM backup.

I am able to restore these files just fine using vzdump.

try this on vista, works here.
http://www.tugzip.com/

 

[RenatoMN]

For .tar.gz files you should enable bzip2 compression on 7zip.

On Linux, include -z option (ex: tar -tzvf for list .tar.gz).

 

[tlphipps]

try this on vista, works here.
http://www.tugzip.com/

Well, that works, but there's got to be something 'strange' about these .tar files since 7-zip says they aren't valid.

I was finally able to get the command-line tar app to list the files too. Had to do a tar -tvf vzdump-101.tar. I think I was leaving off the 'f' earlier.

Thanks for the help!

 

[dietmar]

Well, that works, but there's got to be something 'strange' about these .tar files since 7-zip says they aren't valid.

They are created with 'tar', so these are standard files.