Backing up VM's and LXC's offsite

[bj2277]

Hello everyone,

I hope you're all doing well. I'm planning to set up two Proxmox servers—one at my home and another at a friend's place. I have a mix of VMs and a few LXC containers running on both nodes.

Server 1:

• 256GB Samsung NVMe (OS and some LXC containers)
• 500GB Kingston SATA SSD (for additional VMs and LXC containers)

Server 2:

• Two 256GB SSDs in ZFS (handling all tasks)

My plan is to set up a Proxmox Backup Server as a VM on each node. Each server will back up the other, meaning Server 1 will store backups of Server 2, and vice versa.

I’m still figuring out the best way to implement this and make both servers accessible remotely. To access services within VMs, I currently use Cloudflare Tunnel.

Could someone suggest the best methods for setting up backups between these servers? My data needs are relatively light, as I primarily host websites and applications like Invoice Ninja, OpenVPN, WordPress, Odoo, and a CRM.

If one server goes down, having a backup and a way to restore it to the same server after reinstalling the OS would be critical for me. In the future, I plan to add a 2TB SSD configured with ZFS or Btrfs, so having an offsite backup is important.

Additionally, I’d appreciate any advice on how I could also copy these backups to the cloud for extra peace of mind.

Thanks in advance, and please feel free to correct me if I’m missing something!

 

[Magnus-mercer]

I find this: https://www.vinchin.com/vm-backup/proxmox-offsite-backup.html?s=ehrf84f4hv

 

[t.lamprecht]

Could someone suggest the best methods for setting up backups between these servers?

Yeah, some tunneling might be your safest bet, be it Cloudflare, Tailscale, ... If you got a public IP on either side you can also just use WireGuard directly (most modern tunneling solution use that under the hood anyway) or set up a more batteries-included self-hosted variant like e.g. headscale.
If you currently already use Cloudflare Tunnel and are happy with that then you should be good, data usage is heavy on initial backups/syncs but after that only the delta will be synced.

If one server goes down, having a backup and a way to restore it to the same server after reinstalling the OS would be critical for me.

So I'd create a sync job on both PBS to pull the other PBS datastore to have both data available on both sides.

Additionally, I’d appreciate any advice on how I could also copy these backups to the cloud for extra peace of mind.

There are some companies providing a hosted PBS instances, e.g.: https://forum.proxmox.com/threads/t...server-beta-service.76320/page-10#post-516756
Otherwise, you could run your own PBS instance on a rented VM in some datacenter, depending on where you're located a smallish VM that is big enough to hold the most important data costs a few bucks a month.

Another option might be tape backup, used drives for older LTO technologies are often relatively cheap to get on the second hand markets like ebay. It has different benefits and disadvantages as a cloud copy, but it might be nice that the data never leaves your servers and tape has a long lifespan, albeit if you want to hedge against a home fire then it's naturally not the best option on its own. So mostly mentioning for the sake of completeness and as not everyone has that tech (still) on their radar.