How to Preserve Specific Storage Devices During OS Deployment in MAAS

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I want to ask a question about handling storage on machines managed by MAAS. When releasing a machine, you can choose whether to erase the storage contents, not erase, or perform a quick erase. However, how can I specify that specific devices should not be touched during OS deployment?

Based on my verification with MAAS 3.4.5, wipefs is invoked on all storage devices recognized as connected to the machine during OS deployment, making them clean. However, there are situations where we want to re-install the OS while preserving the data on a machine that has 36 hard disks and 24 SSDs for data storage in addition to the OS installation disk.

So far, the only solution I have found is to remove the disks I don’t want touched during OS deployment from the machine. However, my concern is that these disks will not be targeted for data erasure when I want to erase the data during the machine release process.

How can I prevent the get-curtin-config command in MAAS CLI from issuing the wipe: superblock directive for specific devices?

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The only suggestion I’ve ever seen is as you say - remove the drives from MAAS prior to OS deployment so the superblock is not wiped. But disk erase uses lsblk to find devices to erase rather than rely on data inside MAAS, so it should find all your data drives.

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