Today I installed Proxmox Backup Server in a VM on my hypervisor, and
have just got it all set up to backup all my VM's from both my local hypervisor AND my remote one (using zerotier network to link them together).
The data stores are on my NAS which is running on a Pi with 2 USB raid arrays each at 8TB usable.
What do y'all use for backing up your precious VM's and containers etc? You do back them up, right? RIGHT?! ;)
I'll update tomorrow likely on how the first night's backup went, and if
I am going to use it in favor of Bareos which has been my goto for years at this point.
Nice - glad you jumped into PBS as I *really* love it for all my PVE CT/VMs *and* I used the CLI to setup other backups of physical disks. My PBS does all the PVE backups, AND backs up all my NAS shares. (Physical drives)
I have a 16TB HDD that takes care of my CT/VMs, AND my one
'newBackupXTB' share - and I'm using my OLD 'Backup4TB' 'Backup6TB' and 'Beers4TB' HDDs that I *used* to have in a Raspberry Pi NAS, like yours. When I upgraded my main NAS to enterprise hardware, I was able to
utilize those old drives to backup the the 'OLD' shares I mentioned - transferred their datas to the new NAS in shares of their same name, and PBS has been taking care of things ever since.
I LOVE how backups only add/remove new data/newly erased data (I know
this is called something, lol...) - and it hasn't had one hiccup since!
WELL - a few times there have been a failed backup - but its usually on the PVE side; a VM will get a failed backup and put a lock on the VM
that requires some interdiction; but nothing scary.
Cool - *IF* yer 8TB is done by then!! :P I finally had enough of
30-40Mb/s RPi-NAS speeds and got my 10GB NICs doing the legwork. :P
What do y'all use for backing up your precious VM's and containers etc? You do back them up, right? RIGHT?! ;)
Yeah it actually seems pretty simple to use once you figure it out, it's not "intuitive" until you know, and then it just makes perfect sense how it works. Really liking how easy it is to set up the jobs, sort the garbage collection and pruning frequencies, etc.
I might make the remote backups run just once a week on a Sunday or something if the incrementals are going to take long too, currently they started at 02:00 and it's 08:30 and they're not even half way through
lol.
I might make the remote backups run just once a week on a Sunday or something if the incrementals are going to take long too, currently t started at 02:00 and it's 08:30 and they're not even half way through lol.
That sounds smart... I really implore you to checkout the NON-CT/VM backups, too. Those can easily be setup using 'proxmox-backup-client' on the PBS machine;
proxmox-backup-client backup4TB root.pxar:/mnt/Backup4TB --repository root@pam.pbs.local:Backup4TB_hdd
cron-friendly, add;
export PBS_PASSWORD='password'
etc etc. :P You'll figure all that out when you dig in; you normally
teach ME.
MeaTLoTioN wrote to All <=-
What do y'all use for backing up your precious VM's and containers etc? You do back them up, right? RIGHT?! ;)
MeaTLoTioN wrote to All <=-
What do y'all use for backing up your precious VM's and containers et You do back them up, right? RIGHT?! ;)
I used PBS for a while, then lost the PVE server it was running on. :(
I don't know if all of the metadata is stored in the backup, so if you
restore the VM you'd just need to point it to the data store.
The dedupe feature was great - since I'm backing up file areas that
don't change often.
I ended up going back to the built-in Proxmox backup, but I may move to
setting up a rPi 4 as a PBS server, backing up to NFS and get a quorum
in the process.
On 21 Jan 2026, paulie420 said the following...
I might make the remote backups run just once a week on a Sunday something if the incrementals are going to take long too, curren started at 02:00 and it's 08:30 and they're not even half way th lol.
That sounds smart... I really implore you to checkout the NON-CT/VM backups, too. Those can easily be setup using 'proxmox-backup-client' the PBS machine;
After a couple days of running the backups on a daily/weekly/monthly schedule, the incrementals only take 1h 46m from my remote proxmox host, and the data used is next to nothing which is nice, seeing as it's incremental (if it had been daily fulls I'd be filling up my storage
disk in no time flat lol).
proxmox-backup-client backup4TB root.pxar:/mnt/Backup4TB --repository root@pam.pbs.local:Backup4TB_hdd
cron-friendly, add;
export PBS_PASSWORD='password'
Oh this sounds good too, I do have a couple of VPS's I could back up
with it for sure, maybe even my desktop computer lol.
etc etc. :P You'll figure all that out when you dig in; you normally teach ME.
Hahaha yeah but man we're all in this hobby together and we all know different things, I learn from you and anyone else who has knowledge
that I don't yet. Thanks for sharing this, it will be a nice added bonus for sure.
After a couple days of running the backups on a daily/weekly/monthly schedule, the incrementals only take 1h 46m from my remote proxmox host, and the data used is next to nothing which is nice, seeing as it's incremental (if it had been daily fulls I'd be filling up my storage
disk in no time flat lol).
Hahaha yeah but man we're all in this hobby together and we all know different things, I learn from you and anyone else who has knowledge
that I don't yet. Thanks for sharing this, it will be a nice added bonus for sure.
An Pi can run pbs server? And be quorum for a cluster? interesting.
I would love to have proxmox running on a cluster of pi's and didn't
even think to try again - I tried a few years back before it was a
thing, ended up trying esxi on the pi's which was ok, but I prefer proxmox.
Yeah I sussed it, wrote a script because of course I did and now all
three of my VPSes are being backed up to my PBS server, I had to
increase the vCPU count on the PBS server from 2 cores to 4 as 2 cores seemed a little close to the max, now it's comfortable at 60-70% utilisation - memory usage is next to nothing, I gave it 4GB ram and
it's sat there backing up stuff using like approx 300MB ram lol.
I shall also take a manual "normal" backup of the pbs vm so I have an
easy restore path in case of catastrophe!
I dunno if I'm backing up my PVE/PBS OSes. For PVE, I do backup the
config FILES - which I could rebuild a node fairly easily using... but I think since I run a cluster those files are on the other 2 PVEs anyway; for PBS, I HOPE that the backups could just be imported into a new PBS install - heck, since yer running PBS as a VM, I guess you COULD use PBS to backup PBS - lol.
MeaTLoTioN wrote to poindexter FORTRAN <=-
An Pi can run pbs server? And be quorum for a cluster? interesting.
I would love to have proxmox running on a cluster of pi's and didn't
even think to try again - I tried a few years back before it was a
thing, ended up trying esxi on the pi's which was ok, but I prefer proxmox.
paulie420 wrote to MeaTLoTioN <=-
That sounds smart... I really implore you to checkout the NON-CT/VM backups, too. Those can easily be setup using 'proxmox-backup-client'
on the PBS machine;
proxmox-backup-client backup4TB root.pxar:/mnt/Backup4TB --repository root@pam.pbs.local:Backup4TB_hdd
cron-friendly, add;
export PBS_PASSWORD='password'
etc etc. :P You'll figure all that out when you dig in; you normally
teach ME.
IIRC when you do a backup of a VM, it will backup the disk data, and the config. If you restore one of the backups it will recreate the VM including all the config, so you don't actually need to back that up.
Just make sure you back up a full backup of each VM as a fail safe and store it else where =)
For my proxmox hosts, I've been using cronicle, which schedules the backups on each of the proxmox hosts (calling zvdump and piping the data into restic). For my DBs and docker, I call mysqldump or pg_dump and pipe the data into restic.
I used PBS for a while, then lost the PVE server it was running on. :(
I don't know if all of the metadata is stored in the backup, so if you
restore the VM you'd just need to point it to the data store.
Arelor wrote to poindexter FORTRAN <=-
I have tested PBS enough and performed a number of restores. In the
case of losing your PVE cluster entirely, just create a new cluster
from scratch, add the PBS storage to it, and restore your VMs and containers. Metadata is included in the backup, which means your notes, firewall configurations and the like will survive. You might need to renumber your instances manually.
I'm looking forward to the de-duping feature of PBS - my biggest backup target is my BBS, and the files area rarely changes - but I'm backing up the same files every time.
I'm looking forward to the de-duping feature of PBS - my biggest back target is my BBS, and the files area rarely changes - but I'm backing the same files every time.
I use PBS for EVERYTHING on my homelab; from backing up all my CT/VMs
and even filesystem backups with the CLI tool... I love it.
And, it just sits running on some 200X Dell tower happily serving some 6 HDDs for all the datastores. I'm happy with PVE + PBS working together - and the fact that I can even backup my NAS shares using it is icing on
the top.
On 07 Jul 2026, paulie420 said the following...
I'm looking forward to the de-duping feature of PBS - my biggest back
target is my BBS, and the files area rarely changes - but I'm backing
the same files every time.
I use PBS for EVERYTHING on my homelab; from backing up all my CT/VMs and even filesystem backups with the CLI tool... I love it.
And, it just sits running on some 200X Dell tower happily serving some 6 HDDs for all the datastores. I'm happy with PVE + PBS working together - and the fact that I can even backup my NAS shares using it is icing on the top.
I agree, I'm really enjoying using PBS too, I used to use Bareos (fork of Bacula) to backup my shizzle, but I migrated over to PBS and it made life so much easier. I've got PBS running in a VM on my Proxmox cluster, so if that ever went wobbly, I can just recreate the VM from the backup and I'm back running in
I use PBS for EVERYTHING on my homelab; from backing up all my CT/VMs and even filesystem backups with the CLI tool... I love it.
And, it just sits running on some 200X Dell tower happily serving som HDDs for all the datastores. I'm happy with PVE + PBS working togethe and the fact that I can even backup my NAS shares using it is icing o the top.
I had it running a while ago, then lost the Proxmox server running is as
a guest. Restored from an old legacy Proxmox backup and never got around
to setting it up again.
I'm backing up to a share on my Synology NAS and mapping all NFS users to admin on the NAS but still getting a permission denied issue when I back up. I'll need to see if I saved notes soemwhere.
I'm looking forward to the de-duping feature of PBS - my biggest backup target is my BBS, and the files area rarely changes - but I'm backing up the same files every time.
I run PBS inside a VM on my proxmox, I save the backups to a NFS share
on my UNAS Pro 7, it makes it very easy. I don't need a separate PC to
run just PBS. Before anyone says that running from a VM on the Server is not the right way to do it, if I lose the entire Proxmox server, I can reinstall Proxmox from scratch create a new VM of PBS and restore all backups within an hour. To help fix your share issues with the
This is precisely why I run PBS in a VM also, I've actually had to
rebuild my proxmox entirely fairly recently. I install Proxmox on the
host from scratch, then restore the PBS vm backup, then fire it up and restore everything else. Literally done in an hour.
paulie420 wrote to poindexter FORTRAN <=-
I use PBS for EVERYTHING on my homelab; from backing up all my CT/VMs
and even filesystem backups with the CLI tool... I love it.
And, it just sits running on some 200X Dell tower happily serving some
6 HDDs for all the datastores. I'm happy with PVE + PBS working
together - and the fact that I can even backup my NAS shares using it
is icing on the top.
Bucko wrote to poindexter FORTRAN <=-
all backups within an hour. To help fix your share issues with the permissions, check out my son's video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qms3ffm8H_4 he is Wundertech. There is also the one by Tech Me Out https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m4xEvN2wkj0&t=7s which is specifically
for Synology's. I have used both videos the Tech Me Out one works great with both Xpenology and Synology including TrueNAS. My son's vid worked fantastic with the UNAS.. Check them both out...
Thanks for the links, for some reason when I deleted and recreated thepF> share PBS was able to access the share just fine. It's running at a
dedupe factor of 3.45.
Bucko wrote to poindexter FORTRAN <=-
No problem at all.. Yea, the dedupe is fantastic, mine right now is at 18.45 on I think 10 VM's.. Works like a charm...
I'm streamlining things, cutting my lab down to one box, and
running all of my VMs on it (including PBS). I use PBS to back
everything up and have a PVE dump of the PBS VM - all stored on NFS.
Bucko wrote to poindexter FORTRAN <=-
I was curious about how much metadata is stored in the backup file, and
whether you could bootstrap a restore from a PBS backup. I keep a PVE
backup of PBS on my NAS. My thought is that if I had a failure, I could
reinstall Proxmox, then use the PVE backup of PBS, then restore the VMs
from PBS.
Or, if it would make more sense to install PVE and PBS from scratch,
point it to the PBS datastore and that would suffice?
I'm streamlining things, cutting my lab down to one box, and
running all of my VMs on it (including PBS). I use PBS to back
everything up and have a PVE dump of the PBS VM - all stored on NFS.
With everyone talking about their PBS VM setups here, I need to spin up one of my offline servers and ATTEMPT a PVE install and restore so I know the process a bit better.
paulie420 wrote to poindexter FORTRAN <=-
I'm streamlining things, cutting my lab down to one box, and
running all of my VMs on it (including PBS). I use PBS to back
everything up and have a PVE dump of the PBS VM - all stored on NFS.
With everyone talking about their PBS VM setups here, I need to spin up one of my offline servers and ATTEMPT a PVE install and restore so I
know the process a bit better.
running all of my VMs on it (including PBS). I use PBS to back
everything up and have a PVE dump of the PBS VM - all stored on NFS.
If I lose the server, I bring up another PVE server, mount the
datastore, restore PBS then restore the VMs. Seems manageable.
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