Linux VMs and persistent device naming

For Linux VMs without persistent device naming, multiple disk controllers (such as IDE, SCSI, and SATA) may complicate the recovery of individual files. This issue occurs because non-persistent device naming, such as /dev/sda and /dev/sdb, may cause unexpected mount point changes after a restart. If the VM has a SCSI disk and SATA disk, the Backup, Archive, and Restore interface may show incorrect mount points for the VM's files. For example, the files originally under /vol_a might appear under /vol_b when you browse to restore them. The restore is successful, but the restored files may not be in their original directories.

As a workaround, search for the files on the restored VM and move them to the proper locations.

To prevent this issue on Linux VMs with multiple disk controllers, it is recommended a persistent device-naming method for mounting the file systems. When persistent naming is in place, device mounting is consistent and this issue does not occur when you restore files from future backups.

For persistent device naming, you can mount devices by UUIDs. The following is an example of the /etc/fstab file that contains the devices that are mounted by UUIDs:

UUID=93a21fe4-4c55-4e5a-8124-1e2e1460fece /boot  ext4  defaults  1 2
UUID=55a24fe3-4c55-4e6a-8124-1e2e1460fadf /vola  ext3  defaults  0 0

To find the device UUIDs, you can use either of the following commands:

blkid

ls -l /dev/disk/by-uuid/