Dismissing the utility of backups and realizing your mistake after losing essential data to a catastrophic failure is every home labber’s rite of passage. But since I learned this right at the start of my tinkering journey, my arsenal of backup tools has evolved with the rest of my home lab. While TrueNAS safeguards the documents on my everyday machines, I rely on Proxmox Backup Server for the dozens of LXCs and VMs I’ve scattered across my PVE nodes.
Considering that Proxmox already has built-in backup functionality, PBS may seem redundant, especially if you plan to use a bare-metal system as I do. But once you start looking into the quality-of-life tools that ship with PBS, it goes from an unnecessary upgrade to a powerful recovery mechanism that can help you restore your virtual guests even when things go catastrophically wrong.
PBS may be a companion service, but it’s borderline essential for hardcore Proxmox setups
For one, its snapshots are extremely storage-efficient
During my early Proxmox days, I’d typically use the Backup tab to create spare copies of my virtual guests before going ham on my experiments – and it worked well in the beginning. But once I began using multiple LXCs and VMs, relying on Proxmox’s built-in vzdump feature would cause my hard drive (yes, my broke self used HDDs to house virtual guests back then) to get close to the red zone. Since the vzdump utility creates full backups every time I run it, even a few redundant copies of LXCs and VMs would end up hogging dozens of GBs on my PVE storage pools. So, you can imagine why I’d maintain no more than two backups for my virtual guests.
However, Proxmox Backup Server is extremely efficient when it comes to storage resources, with incremental snapshots being its biggest advantage over PVE’s vzdump provisions. Once PBS has created a snapshot, subsequent backup tasks only save the changes I’ve made to the virtual guest, as opposed to creating the same amount of GBs for each snapshot. Proxmox Backup Server also supports deduplication, and if a specific chunk exists in older snapshots (or even on other VMs), PBS only saves it once.
Factor in the garbage collector that routinely checks for (and removes) unreferenced files as well as the data compression mechanisms supported by PBS, and it can tackle my backup woes without forcing me to spend ungodly amounts of money on hard drives.
Its sync tasks are perfect for 3-2-1 backup workflows
Although a PBS node is better than nothing, leaving my snapshots on a single workstation isn’t a good idea, as I wouldn’t be able to recover my Proxmox nodes if something happened to my snapshot housing machine. That’s where the sync tasks come in handy, as they can replicate my snapshot datastore to additional PBS nodes – including those outside my local network.
I’ve configured my secondary PBS node to pull the snapshots instead of relying on the push mechanism. Thanks to Tailscale, I had zero issues connecting this remote system with my local Proxmox Backup Server instance.
Building a Proxmox Backup Server pipeline wasn’t all that expensive, either
But if PBS isn’t feasible, you can always go back to Proxmox’s vzdump backups
Just like Proxmox Virtual Environment, PBS doesn’t require state-of-the-art hardware to run. In fact, I’ve got an old N100 mini-PC serving as my primary PBS workstation, and the 4TBs worth of HDDs I’ve slotted into it are more than enough to house snapshots of the virtual inhabitants of my home lab. I’d always recommend opting for a bare-metal PBS setup, but if you’ve got a NAS that supports virtualization, deploying Proxmox Backup Server as a VM is always an option.
Personally, I run a virtualized PBS instance on my offsite NAS, but you can also connect to S3-compatible cloud platforms for 3-2-1 backup workflows if you don’t have a remote server. All that said, the vzdump functionality isn’t terrible by any means, especially for newcomers to the PVE ecosystem. Sure, you won’t get the same storage efficiency or recovery features as PBS, but vzdump backups are easy to use and work well when it comes to restoring your painstakingly configured virtual guests. Plus, you can always copy them from your PVE node using an FTP server if you want extra redundancy.
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