This past weekend I decided to move some VMs from one Proxmox server to another. Thankfully the process was very easy and could be done in under 10 commands! I utilized a 1TB external USB to store my backed up VMs on on my source system.

Let's get started! Make sure the source server can reach the destination server via SSH. First move into the directory where you want to put your backed up VMs in. For me this was /mnt/storage. Then start taking backups of your VM(s).

vzdump 100 --dumpdir /mnt/storage --tmpdir /mnt/storage

The number 100 in the above example is the ID of the VM. Once the backup has been completed we'll want to copy it over to the desintation server.

scp vzdump-qemu-100-2020_11_00-00_14_30.vma root@192.168.1.10:/mnt/storage2/vzdump-qemu-100-2020_11_00-00_14_30.vma

You can adjust the path to where you're sending it on the destination server. I used another 1TB USB drive on my destination server as well. Once the transfer is complete we need to restore it! We run this on the destination server:

cd /mnt/storage
qmrestore vzdump-qemu-100-2020_11_00-00_14_30.vma 110

First make sure you go into the directory where you transferred the backup too. Next, the last number in the 2nd command is going to be the new ID of the VM. Since I already had some VMs on my destination server I just picked the next ID.

Of note, depending on the size of the backups it can take some time to backup, transfer between source and destination as well as restore. However, I didn't hit any snags and everything went smoothly!