My routine quarterly disaster-recovery test in my Proxmox homelab—shutting down the production node and restoring its backups onto a second machine—turned up a few minor issues: the backup node ran out of disk space, was still on an old Proxmox version, and was missing a config fix for backing up LXCs to NFS. The exercise also prompted me to reflect on sticking with Proxmox, Synology’s reliability, and the Uptime Kuma and ntfy monitoring that confirmed services came back up...
I explain how to back up and migrate a Docker named volume between hosts using the official method: stopping the container, then running a temporary container that mounts the volume and tars its data to a file. I work through an example with Uptime Kuma that covers moving the data to a new VM and restoring it into a fresh install, including a gotcha where restoring to the wrong path leaves the data nested and ignored. I end by questioning why simply copying the volume’s files from the local filesystem isn’t recommended...
My Proxmox backup of an unprivileged LXC container to an NFS share failed with tar permission errors, even though privileged container backups to the same share worked. Testing with throwaway containers, I traced the problem to vzdump’s temp directory living on the NFS mount, and setting tmpdir to /tmp in /etc/vzdump.conf fixed it. I walk through the error logs and include some skepticism about the common forum explanation...
Proxmox saves VM backups to local storage by default, which is no help if the host dies and makes restoring to a different node awkward. My walkthrough covers creating a shared folder with NFS permissions on a Synology NAS, then adding that share as storage at the datacenter level in Proxmox so backups and restores can happen from any node, making it easy to move VMs between hosts...
Before adding RAM to my Proxmox production server, I shut down my VMs, take snapshots, and copy the backups off local storage. I locate the backup directory via Proxmox’s storage config, pull the files to a laptop with scp, and note a zsh gotcha where wildcards in the command need escaping...
After upgrading my homelab with a new HP 800 G2 to run production Docker containers, I migrate my existing VM from an old Proxmox host to the new one. I walk through backing up the VM to a single file, transferring the backup between servers via FileZilla, and restoring it, with everything working after just nine minutes of downtime...
