Hello all,
I’m hoping to get some advice on my self hosting environment. I currently run Proxmox VE with a few VMs, and use Proxmox VE’s built in VM backup method to my NAS. I don’t currently have a good backup method for the host server itself, and I know I’m playing with fire not having that properly backed up.
I have an older laptop that I’m considering turning into a Proxmox Backup Server, which should allow me to backup the host server and VMs, which would make me feel a lot better. The one thing I haven’t really seen info on in my research is if there’s a convenient way to backup THE backup server. If anyone uses PBS, do you back that up as well? How so?
I appreciate any assistance or advice!
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Quick info: you cannot backup the Host server with PBS, only VMs and LXCs.
Edit: there seems to be some ways to send a manual backup of the PVE host to PBS but it seems to be CLI only and I don’t think the GUI allows that.
Also, you might want to put the backups in a dedicated partition or drive if you can, so you’d just have to reinstall pbs in case it get bad. I don’t know any way to backup pbs, as I don’t do that myself, maybe backuppc ?
Also, you might want to put the backups in a dedicated partition or drive if you can, so you’d just have to reinstall pbs in case it get bad.
Yea that’s the main plan, the laptop would hold the PBS system, but all backups would go straight to the NAS. if the laptop dies I can just find something else to put PBS on with minimal hassle.
For Proxmox Backup Server, if you’re looking to get those backups off site or onto cheaper media without losing visibility, check out HuskHoard. It’s a FOSS data tiering engine that can archive cold data chunks to LTO tape, SMR drives, or S3. The cool part is that the files stay fully visible to your Linux OS. If you ever need to restore, HuskHoard fetches the data back from the archive automatically. It’s a way to build a bottomless backup target.
Pretty sure PBS doesn’t support backing up the PVE host itself. You can find Scripts on github to backup the PVE config
You can use the Backup Client to backup any physical host: https://pbs.proxmox.com/docs/backup-client.html
Yea that’s what I’ve seen so far, just a backup of the /etc/pve files and other network configs should be good enough I suppose.
Oh how good is that. Thanks the info
The real benefit of PBS is it does not store the backup as just a 1:1 dump of the VM disk, it’s incremental - if the VM you’re backing up for say the 3rd or 4th or 20th time doesn’t have much new or changed data, it’s not a linearly increasing amount of storage on your backup server, the new backup is actually trivially small. This really helps you have longer backup retention if files aren’t actually changing all that often.
I got tired of stressing about whether my backup host might be down when my primary Proxmox host dies, even if they’re in different data centers - well, as far as I know anyway! Now I just use BackBlaze B2 storage for the PBS off-site backup (compatible with Amazon S3), albeit it’s a little finnicky to set up and working 100%. Yes it’s still ‘just someone else’s computer’, but for the ~12 bucks it’s costing me for almost 2TB of backup data I am not stressing about it.
I might get in trouble for saying this on this channel ;) - BUT - If memory serves, Proxmox has native support for backing up to an AWS S3 bucket. I think I paid something like $3/month for it when it was setup - very minimal. While not really “self hosting”, I would argue backups are the one thing you should actually do offsite, ideally with some resiliency.
I hope no one would crucify you for it, you’re just trying to help :). I have a plan for offsite backups, but it’s nice to know about alternatives.
