Accessing files from a proxmox mounted volume

My proxmox machine died. I’m the first to admit, I probably shouldn’t have had one running one as it was all way above my knowledge base. However, the draw was there to run multiple “mini VMs” to host various home tools.

I had containers for Plex, MQTT (for Home Assistant) and a Unifi Controller. It all worked nicely until it died. The whole thing wouldn’t boot up – it was also way out of date (I know, I know).

I had two 1TB SSDs in the machine which contained movies for plex. They were mounted and part of the Plex container. I am not sure if I did it right – but there they were – and they worked. I could access the “movie” folders on the SSDs via FTP from my home PC which worked nicely to add new media.

I decided to grab another old PC and set up Ubuntu with plex on it – just to simplify things. ie: I didn’t want to run another proxmox as I found it all a bit much.

The issue came when I plugged my SSDs in to the new Ubuntu machine. I was expecting to simply see my “Movie” folders on there. Nope. There was some image folders and other random things. What I did find was some .raw files which were attached to the Plex container. Bugger. I did everything to try and open them without luck.

What I ended up doing was putting the Proxmox SSD in to the working PC and attach my two movie SSDs. It booted up (yay!) in to the PVE command line. Here’s how I managed to get the movie files off…

(BTW, most of this I think was luck.. hopefully some of these commands might help people!)

View all the mount points within the Proxmox environment

#view the mount points
losetup

This seemed to show a load of “/dev/loop1” type points – each pointing to a mount within the containers. I found two which were my movie mounts.

#create a mount point for the files
mkdir /mnt/source_movies

Now to mount the loop to the new source

mount /dev/loop2 /mnt/source_movies

You can then browse the files which were in that mount!

cd /mnt/source_movies
ls 

Bingo! I could then see the movies. But, I wanted to get them out of the container raw file jobby and in to a “normal” drive. So, I plugged in a blank SSD and set about mounting that.

lslbk #showed the new drive which was on sdb.

mkdir /mnt/movies #create a new mount point for the new drive
mount /dev/sdb /mnt/movies #mounty mount
rsync --progress -r /mnt/source_movies /mnt/movies

The rsync command above worked nicely as I wanted to see that things were actually being copied. Turns out it all worked perfectly. I was able to then plug in the new movie SSD to ubuntu and all the files were there.

While I was doing this, I also mounted other containers and was able to access backups for unifi and grab the settings for my mosquitto MQTT server. Winning.

I am NOT in any shape or form a Linux expert (as you can see). I cobbled this all together through trial and error. But, I hope it might help someone else. Also this acts as a source for my own notes as usual – which I’ll need again sometime soon and no-doubt, will forget how I did it. Good luck!