Telling ProxMox a Backup Target is Mounted Externally
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While generally not recommended, sometimes we need to back up to a USB drive or other hard mounted backup location in ProxMox.
Problem: USB and other external devices can easily lose their mount while a system is already online causing the mount point to unmount forcefully and leaving a folder where the mountpoint had been. Rarely do we want the backup function of ProxMox to backup to that local folder, we rather want the backup mechanism to fail and then have an opportunity to alert us to fix the backup location issue.
Solution: Inform ProxMox at an application level that the backup location is a mountpoint and not a local folder so that it runs detection prior to backing up.
What to do?
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Get your list of storage locations from ProxMox
pvesm status -
Find your backup location NAME on that list. It is a ProxMox label, not the folder name. For many of you it might just be called something like "backup"
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Inform ProxMox to test if the location is mounted prior to backing up. Replace the word backup in this example with the NAME you got from step 2.
pvesm set backup --is_mountpoint yes -
You are done if that succeeds silently, but you can double check that the change has been made by looking for it in this file:
cat /etc/pve/storage.cfg
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