“Also, if you use LVM across hard drives, you may lose all your data when only one drive fails.”
I know. I’m not doing this, and I have RAID anyway.
Just a question first: Why don’t you using zfs ?
I don’t see a point in using zfs on top of RAID, and LVM is a lot easier on resources.
Which OS are you using ? Which version of LXD ?
Ubuntu Bionic and LXD 3.
Before we can dive into deeper have you seen this: Backing up containers and this Backup the container and install it on another server ?
Not until now but I don’t see how any information there is more relevant than what’s in the official documentation? The info in your second link seems actually outdated, it shouldn’t be necessary to publish an image from a container in order to export it, you can run the command directly on the container.
This comment by Stephan made it clear that there simply is no easy way of doing a restore:
Restoring that is a bit harder though. You’ll need to create a /var/lib/lxd/storage-pools/POOL-NAME/containers/NAME path matching the name of the backed up container. Then if the storage pool is zfs or btrfs or lvm, you’ll need to create the applicable dataset, subvolume or lv and mount it on /var/lib/lxd/storage-pools/POOL-NAME/containers/NAME and then unpack your backup tarball onto it.
But it’s been almost 2 years since Stephan made this comment and in the meantime substantial changes were made. That’s why I thought it makes sense to ask the question again: Where do we stand today? Is restoring a lvm based LXD host (where no second LXD host for backup is being used) still a very much manual process and if yes, how does it look like today? Naturally, it would be super if some kind of automation was available but I couldn’t find anything pre-made.