Backup de-duplication, and general guidance?

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79corvette

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Jun 20, 2023
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Is the preferred way to backup LXC and VMs in Proxmox to use the Backups tool in Datacenter -> Backups? By default these backups appear to be saved in the "local" filesystem. Is the idea that LXC backups will go here and then the entire pve disk (local + local-LVM, including the LXC backups) will be backed up somewhere else, ie to an external disk?

Also, is it possible to configure de-duplicated LXC backups through the Proxmox VE gui? I am just starting to learn Proxmox have a very simple setup to test/figure things out. Currently my backups appear to generate full snapshots of each LXC which over time will start to consume a significant amount of storage (see image).

Really appreciate any help you can offer!

1688348077138.png
 
Highly recommend using Proxmox Backup Server for this. It's a separate but related product for backing up Proxmox VE VMs. It handles deduplication and retention policies. For production use they recommend running it on separate hardware, but you can run it as a VM for testing.
 
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brendan_ said:
Highly recommend using Proxmox Backup Server for this. It's a separate but related product for backing up Proxmox VE VMs. It handles deduplication and retention policies. For production use they recommend running it on separate hardware, but you can run it as a VM for testing.
Click to expand...

Thanks for your reply. I looked at Proxmox Backup Server briefly, but moved on when I saw the recommendation to use dedicated hardware. This will never be "production" in the sense that a corporation or large org will rely on it, but it will be part of my home lab and needs to be robust, stable and reliably backed up.

I'll do some more reading on Backup Server, but in your experience would it be reasonable to run permanently in a VM in this application or do I need a different solution?
 
79corvette said:
Thanks for your reply. I looked at Proxmox Backup Server briefly, but moved on when I saw the recommendation to use dedicated hardware. This will never be "production" in the sense that a corporation or large org will rely on it, but it will be part of my home lab and needs to be robust, stable and reliably backed up.

I'll do some more reading on Backup Server, but in your experience would it be reasonable to run permanently in a VM in this application or do I need a different solution?
Click to expand...
Against the official advice, I do run PBS in a VM in production. As long as you have the contents of the datastore and any encryption keys you can rebuild. Just be mindful to copy them elsewhere - rsync or rclone is fine. Official advice is also to keep the PBS datastore on SSDs, but I get by with an enterprise HDD and I've heard others also use HDDs. I suspect a consumer HDD would be fine for a home lab. Verification jobs do take a while on HDDs (about 5 hours/day in my setup), but I don't notice any detrimental effects.
 
Thanks everyone for your suggestions. Really appreciate it.

spirit said:
you can also install pbs packages on the proxmox node if you want. (for an homelab with a single node, it can be ok)

https://pbs.proxmox.com/docs/installation.html
"Install Proxmox Backup Server on Proxmox VE"
Click to expand...
What are the disadvantages of doing this? Just more complex setup and less "interchangeability" of the host if you ever want to migrate to a different physical computer with a clean proxmox installation?
 
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