Restored Container From Non Native Backup, How to Copy Container Config from Source?

[gaia]

LXD 5.8 via snap, all CTs use the dir driver

i need to exclude certain dirs during copy, otherwise the CTs are too big and take too long to transfer. So I used a non native backup solution (proxmox backup client) to copy the containers files (/var/snap/lxd/common/lxd/storage-pools/default/containers/my-ct) from the source machine and restored it into the target machine.

Where is my-ct’s config file on the source host so that I may re-create it on the target? Or maybe I should create a dummy config and overwrite the config?

[tomp (Thomas Parrott)]

LXD doesn’t use config files, everything is in its database.

My suggestion would be to attach custom volumes for the directories you don’t want included in the normal lxc export backup file. Then you can use lxc import to recreate it on the target server.

[fback]

This is unofficial way, but in this case you can use lxd recover command on backups’ target directory.

Linux Containers - LXD - Has been moved to Canonical

`lxd recover` as a non-interactive command for specific container recoveries

Hi @tomp , before the release of the new disaster recovery tool I used the import command lxd import foo --force to import containers inside my restore-scripts that sync’ed the data beforehand by rsync into the appropriate directory. In this restore-process the container name foo might have been changed from the original name with intension. For example to setup a test environment from a rsync backup of a production environment with a different container name. It would be great to extend lx…

You can look at the backup.yaml file, which stores the necessary configuration data.

IMHO this is a useful (alternative) solution when you already have a backup or manage a large volume of data.