I recently migrated my Proxmox installation from a single drive to a dual drive in ZFS Raid1. The actual process of switching from a single drive to a dual drive was pretty easy. I backed up all of my VMs, installed the new drive, and then reinstalled Proxmox (allowing it to reformat my drives along the way).

The hitch came when restoring from backups. Two things went wrong:

1. I didn’t have backups for Proxmox Backup Server, so I needed to install it from scratch in order to recover my other VMs.
2. When I tried to bring up my Proxmox Backup Server, I had difficulty mounting my NAS (where the backups are actually stored) because I only know the NAS by hostname. Hostnames are resolved via my DNS Server (Pihole) which runs in a VM on my proxmox host.

As you can imagine, the fix was pretty simple – installing Proxmox Backup Server from scratch is quite easy and once I figured out the IP of my NAS, I just had to mount it and all was well. But I could make it easier for next time…

Backing up Proxmox Backup Server

The reason I didn’t have backups for Proxmox Backup Server was to avoid circular dependencies. All of VMs were set to backup nightly using Proxmox Backup Server.. but I didn’t want to backup Proxmox Backup Server to itself, so I excluded it from the backup job.

To resolve this for next time, I created a separate backup job which backs up Proxmox Backup Server directly to my NAS. This backup job is scheduled to run after the backup job for the other VMs and follows the same retention policy.

Mounting NAS using IP

I like my home network to be “IP-less”. That is, my router assigns IPs and at the same time advertises their hostnames as local DNS entries. That way, I don’t have to remember IP addresses. However, my router advertises Pi-hole (running in Proxmox) as the primary DNS Server and Pi-Hole uses the router as its upstream DNS.. so if Pihole is down, I can’t use hostnames anymore.

To resolve this, I setup my router to give my NAS a static IP (For some reason, I feel weird about making the NAS itself request a static IP) and then I setup Proxmox Backup Server to mount that IP instead of mounting my NAS by hostname.

In the future, I should be able to restore Proxmox Backup Server from backups hosted on my NAS and it won’t have any problems starting up and mounting my NAS.

The Final Flow

If I need to reinstall Proxmox again, the flow should be a lot less problematic.

1. Ensure that my NAS is up and running: it has all the backups.
2. Restore Proxmox Backup Server from the backups hosted directly on my NAS. This should work flawlessly because it is configured to mount my NAS via a static IP.
3. Add “Proxmox Backup Server” as a new storage in Proxmox. This will allow me to restore my other VMs.
4. Restore my other VMs.
5. Create new backup schedules as described above.