I was in your position recently and decided to install PVE from scratch and restore VMs from backup.

I had a fairly complex PVE config so it took some additional work to get everything up and running. But it was absolutely worth it.

Same. It works great.

I replaced the drives, installed the newest version of PVE, then restored all of my VMs from local USB backup. I had to reconfigure a number of things such as HDD pass through and other network settings, but in the end the migration was a success.

I don’t work in IT at all. My self hosting journey started when I got sick of feeling powerless in the face of big tech companies who are increasingly ripping off customers or violating their right to privacy. There’s also the general mistrust that comes from my data being repeatedly breached or leaked because share holder profits are more important than investing in basic security.

When I say local I mean automated PVE backups the same as it would be through PBS. If that makes any difference.

I have a remote pbs but the backups aren’t current because there was a connection error. I have Proxmox backups locally to a USB thumbdrive. That’s what I was going to restore from.

This is the way. Frigate just had a major update and the UI is now amazing.