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+++ title = "Recovering from a root 'rm' and why you need backups" tags = ["recovery", "backup", "proxmox"] date = "2021-02-06" description = "test" +++
Last week I was finally getting around to fixing my backup tooling and validating the recovery procedures. I thought it would be a good idea to have rolling nightly backups on a secondary ZFS pool with weekly syncs to an external disk. I ended up using this exact command to purge the rolling backups:
$ find ${BACKUP_FOLDER}/* -mtime +${DAYS_TO_KEEP} -exec rm {} \;
Before we go any further, I want to point out that I was using the variable ${BACKUP_DIR}, not ${BACKUP_FOLDER}.
Can you see where this is going? Yeah.. I didn't pick that up before running my new majestic backup script. Half an hour later I came back to pages of ssh logs resembling /bin/rm: command not found. Oops. I instantly knew what had happened, I'd completely written off my Proxmox host and I was lucky it removed the /bin/rm binary before removing any actual data.
Further investigation showed that I'd wiped most of /bin and the system was barely usable, I still had rsync.. yay! I quickly shutdown all of my containers/vms and rsync'd /etc to my primary ZFS cluster before rebooting to a fresh Proxmox install. After reformatting my root drive and reinstalling from scratch, I copied /etc/pve/lxc and
/etc/pve/qemu-sever back into place, ran zpool import {data,storage} and gave it one more reboot.
I have never been so relieved to check and see all of my containers booting up back to their normal state. There was one or two other small things I had to fix up post-install such as reinstall nfs-kernel-server and several other packages. Overal I was pretty lucky I could copy my container configs before reinstalling and total downtime was under an hour.
Backups are important
Test your backups.
Don't get caught out and expect everything to be there when you really need it.