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Migrating from Cloudbox to Saltbox

Saltbox is a continuation of the Cloudbox project and is mostly compatible out of the box. Very little has to be done to bring your old Cloudbox data into Saltbox. Any customisations you have made or special roles are going to require extra work as Saltbox uses Traefik instead of nginx.

IMPORTANT: Migration has the same requirements as a new install; Saltbox still expects a clean install of the OS; this means that you cannot upgrade an existing Cloudbox setup to Saltbox in place. You will have to back up, reinstall the OS fresh on the machine, then start the migration. Do not upgrade your Ubuntu 18.04 Cloudbox machine to Ubuntu 20.04 and try to run this migration. It won't work.

Before Migration

Backup from Cloudbox as you normally would. You will need to make the backup drive available to your new saltbox install via rclone just as you would with a Cloudbox restore. We are really only interested in keeping the data stored in /opt and not the Cloudbox configuration files. We will be using the data from the configuration files so you may find it handy to download those locally to use as a reference. If you have community containers set up you should make a copy of those files as well. We are more interested in the data stored in these files so it is perfectly fine to just copy and paste the information into a text file for your reference as part of the installation process.

  • Cloudbox files to keep handy (these files should be found in ~/cloudbox/):
accounts.yml

You may need to decrypt your accounts.yml file if you used the encryption option. Do this before you shut down or wipe your old server.

adv_settings.yml
ansible.cfg
backup_config.yml

If you are using a service account to authenticate your rclone backup remote, you will need to put that service account file in place on the saltbox server before you run the restore.

This trips people up frequently, so it bears repeating:

If you are using a service account to authenticate your rclone backup remote, you will need to put that service account file in place on the saltbox server before you run the restore.

If you don't understand what this means, ask on the Discord before you attempt this migration; doing so will save you a failure that will drive you to the Discord anyway.

  • Community files to keep handy (these files should be found in /opt/community/):
ansible.cfg
hetzner_nfs.yml
settings.yml
telly.yml
  • Rclone configuration file

The rclone.conf file located in ~/.config/rclone/rclone.conf if your configuration uses service accounts to authenticate the remotes you will need make sure the service accounts are accessible. 

rclone.conf

Migration

IMPORTANT: Migration has the same requirements as a new install; Saltbox still expects a clean install of the OS; this means that you cannot upgrade an existing Cloudbox setup to Saltbox in place. You will have to back up, reinstall the OS fresh on the machine, then start the migration. Do not upgrade your Ubuntu 18.04 Cloudbox machine to Ubuntu 20.04 and try to run this migration. It won't work.

Do not proceed unless the machine you're using is a fresh install of Ubuntu 20.04 or 22.04.

  • Install the saltbox dependencies
curl -sL https://install.saltbox.dev | sudo -H bash; cd /srv/git/saltbox

Saltbox is going to move this file into the correct location; you're putting it here only so saltbox knows where to find it.

You can refer to your Cloudbox configuration files and copy relevant settings over from them, but do not just copy your existing Cloudbox config files into place. Direct compatibility with Cloudbox config files is not guaranteed and will not be maintained going forward.

IMPORTANT: DO NOT use your cloudbox configuration files. You can copy and paste individual values [values like your plex username and token, not sections like the entire plex section] from your cloudbox files, but DO NOT use the originals. Things have moved from file to file compared to Cloudbox, there are new values that are required, there are values that have been deprecated. Work on the new default settings files and edit them using your cloudbox files as a reference.

  • Run the preinstall command.

This step will create the specified user account, add it to sudoers, update the kernel, edit GRUB configuration, install Rclone, and reboot the server if needed. 

  sb install preinstall

  • switch to the newly created user specified in your configuration.

  • If you are restoring a Cloudbox backup, you should change the default rclone backup path in /srv/git/saltbox/backup_config.yml to point to your Cloudbox backup. Once you've done this initial restore, change it back to the location of your choice.

---
backup:
...
  rclone:
    enable: true
    destination: google:/Backups/Saltbox               <<<  THIS ONE HERE
 ...
  • run the restore command. 
  sb install restore

Remember that if you use a service account file to authenticate an rclone remote, you need to manually put that file into place before running the restore.

Then you should be able to install tags as you want.

  • install top-level tag [if desired] 

  sb install saltbox
- install individual tags [if desired] 

  sb install emby
- install sandbox tags [if required] 

  sb install sandbox-nextcloud