[pve-devel] [pbs-devel] [PATCH 00/11] live-restore for PBS snapshots

[Thomas Lamprecht]

On 11.01.21 16:50, aderumier at odiso.com wrote:
> if we could make some kind of qemu-nbd + mount loop of the backup
> volume for example.

That is already possible through qemu-nbd tool (we have a PBS block driver backend),
see: https://lists.proxmox.com/pipermail/pve-user/2020-July/171883.html

Or do you mean something else?

FWIW, there's an idea (and some intial POC) to later also have a file explorer similar
like for file level backups in PVE, which starts a minimal VM, directly booting a
shipped Linux initrd and pbs rust daemon, providing an API to list/extract files from
any blocklevel backup containing a filesystem a modern Linux kernel can understand.

The VM is used for isolation purpose, every kernel FS dev says mounting a filesystem
should be considered unsafe and can theoretically altered to break the host. As
backups may not be 100% trusted a VM environment is much safer.