This guide will cover following scenario – you have a new machine, and fresh Proxmox installation on it. You transferred your VMs from another, “old” Proxmox machine to USB drive by backing them up on it. So, your VM backups are on a USB drive now, and you would like to transfer them to new Proxmox machine. After you plug in USB drive to your new Proxmox installation on another machine – you cannot see your backup, what now?
First of all, if you done backup properly, don’t worry – your VMs are on that USB drive.
Also, it would be smart not to format your old Proxmox machine/installation, before you resotred VMs to the new installation and you are sure that it works.
So, after I attached my USB drive to the new Proxmox install and went to backup section – it was empty.
Backups were not recognized.
Ok, we need to first establish where is our USB drive mounted
Select your Proxmox node and go to disks. I can see that my USB drive with backup on it is /dev/sda and partition is /dev/sda1. I need to mount /dev/sda1 as backup on my new Proxmox.
You can also check this in shell by running
lsblk -o +FSTYPE,UUID /dev/sd*Large partition is usually your backup partition.
Open shell on your Proxmox node and type in following to create new directory, which we will mount our USB to
mkdir /mnt/backupAfter that I will “mount” my USB drive partition /dev/sda1 to created directory /mnt/backup
mount /dev/sda1 /mnt/backup
In last step I will add that mount as PVE storage config.
pvesm add dir backup --path /mnt/backup --content backup
This is not permanent and will dismount once you reboot. You can make it permanent by editing /etc/fstab
After a short period of time, I could see my backup mounted.
After I clicked on it, in the submenu section I selected Backups and my backups were visible there, waiting to be restored.
By clicking on restore, I was able to successfully restore both of my machines to new Proxmox installation.
That is it, if you done everything correctly, your VMs should be up on a new Proxmox installation.