I was running Home Assistant in a VM successfully for months. Realized I needed a better backup solution for rollbacks, and found the vmbackup plugin. Perfect. Installed that, started to point it to my Home Assistant disk. Read through the help text on a bunch of options, and saw this about snapshots:
Oh crap. I didn't know this was going to shut down Home Assistant every time it ran. And I change things in HA regularly, so I was hoping to back it up every night. I better use snapshots. But my hassos.qcow2 file was on the disk array rather than cache, because I only had one cache drive. But no fear, I'm about to have vmbackups!
I shut down the Home Assistant VM. No reason to believe it didn't shut down correctly. (I had turned it off and back on a week earlier to pass-through a USB Zigbee stick, and it came back online that time.)
I changed the preferences of my domains share to "Prefer" on being stored on the cache.
Rather than wait for the mover or trigger it manually, I SSHed in to Unraid and copied the file from /mnt/user/domains/HassOS/hassos.qcow2 to /mnt/cache/domains/HassOS/hassos.qcow2. I believe I double-checked the permissions and ownership to make sure they were the same.
I changed the VM settings to point to the new location at /mnt/cache/domains/HassOS/hassos.qcow2.
Turned on the VM.
The green light turned on, but I couldn't access Home Assistant. Used VNC and just saw this:
That's not good. I think I might have screwed up when copying from /mnt/user instead of finding the actual disk and copying from there. I also remember when I first set up the VM following these instructions that I ran qemu-img to resize the disk. It worked great, though I don't know much about what it did, and could that have screwed it up? I tried to undo my mistake:
Stopped the VM, pointed it back at /mnt/user/domains/HassOS/hassos.qcow2, and restarted. Didn't work, same screen as above.
I found the original image on disk3. Stopped the VM, pointed it at /mnt/disk3/domains/HassOS/hassos.qcow2, and restarted. Didn't work either, same screen as above.
Stopped the VM, created a brand new VM with the same settings, pointed it at the above location. No dice. WTF??
Googled for a couple hours, all I could find are people that have similar issues but can still see "FS0:" in the Mapping Table and are able to repair things from there.
I'm at a loss. Wondering if I need to recreate my entire HA setup from scratch now... 😰 Or at least if there's some way to mount the qcow2 image so I can retrieve my HA configuration when recreating the VM. But I thought I'd ask here first and see if anyone has an idea of how to save my original image. Please help, you're my only hope!