Back up local files to tape?

[ahorner]

I have just set up PBS to use for my offsite backups to tape. The server on which PBS is now running contains a ZFS pool which already contains data I have backed up from other machines.

Is it possible to back up these directories in the pool incrementally without needing to copy that data to a datastore, therefore duplicating it?

Thanks

 

[wbk]

Hi ahorner,

Welcome to the forums!

Proxmox does not provide an option to write to tape other than from datastore.

To get an idea of the context, these data on your pool are backed up outside of the Proxmox-backup-mechanism?

 

[ahorner]

Hi @wbk,

This is correct, yes. Specifically from a couple of Windows machines, a desktop and a laptop.

Files are copied over the network from these devices to my pool as a backup.

This same pool also contains a dataset which is used by PBS as a datastore, so having to backup the data again to a datastore would result in the same data on the pool twice just in different datasets.

 

[wbk]

To fit in the Proxmox deduplication framework, I think there is no way around having a PBS datastore.

There "theoretically" is a way around having your separate copy in the ZFS pool though. You could install the backup client on the Windows machines (provided they run a recent enough Windows version to install the backup client, ie, have an option of running Linux binaries). Then you could send the backups to the datastore directly and benefit from the options PBS provides.

If this sounds impractical, maybe another board member can provide alternate suggestions.

 

[ahorner]

This sounds like it's asking for a failure. Since WSL binaries don't run directly in the context of Windows I'd be hesitant to trust it for backups and restored to be honest. I appreciate the suggestion though, thank you!

 

[ahorner]

@wbk I have been looking further into this and after having trouble trying to get the PBS Client running in a simple Ubuntu WSL instance I have found a couple of options which I wanted to put here for the sake of others whom may come across this thread.

There is an AppImage version of PBS Client which has been created to avoid dependency issues on various flavours of Linux, found at https://github.com/dleidert/proxmox-backup-client.appimage based on the discussion requesting a statically linked PBS Client binary on the Proxmox Bugzilla https://bugzilla.proxmox.com/show_bug.cgi?id=4788

It is important to note that as far as I can tell, because the Linux binary is indeed intended for just Linux, there is no support for Windows-centric thing like Windows security attributes and VSS. There is another option for VSS support though:

https://github.com/tizbac/proxmoxbackupclient_go is an ongoing project which is a Go implementation of a PBS Client which uses VSS for running backups on Windows. It also does not support Windows security attributes as this is understandably a limitation of PBS itself.

This is straying a little offtopic, but I am not sure if that Go implementation - or even the official PBS Client - work the same was as the PVE backup to PBS in terms of chunk deduplication on the client (PVE, PBS Client, PBS Go) side reducing network traffic. Any insight into this would be greatly appreciated!

 

[wbk]

Thanks for giving back your findings!

Without digging into it, I can only speculate on client side chunk deduplication / checking. I'll leave that to someone more knowledgeable.

 

[Dunuin]

There is also the option to let the Windows hosts share the data via SMB. You could then mount the SMB shares on any Debian-based machine (Debian VM, PVE, PBS) and use the proxmox backup client to backup the SMB contents to your PBS datastore.

 

[ahorner]

There is also the option to let the Windows hosts share the data via SMB. You could then mount the SMB shares on any Debian-based machine (Debian VM, PVE, PBS) and use the proxmox backup client to backup the SMB contents to your PBS datastore.

This is certainly a valid option, though comes with the security implications of SMB of course. It also will not (as far as I am aware) store Windows security data and will not for sure use VSS.

 

[Dunuin]

Yes, but at least for the security you could put that Debian with the backup client and the Win clients in an isolated vlan so nothing except for that Debian can access those SMB shares.