Backup failed, file system corrupted

[Bastian987]

Hi,
I'm new to Proxmox VE and PBS. I have installed Proxmox VE and set up PBS as a virtual machine. I know that's not optimal, but I don't have additional hardware. The PBS should backup to an external disc (in addition, most important data is also stored in a cloud backup according to the 3-2-1 rule). In PVE, I have added a regular backup job for all VMs, including the PBS. Was that a mistake and I should only backup all VMs but the PBS?

Looking at the logs, I just found that the backup run of last week is still pending, I aborted the process manually in the GUI.



VM 102 is the PBS.



Any help to identify and fix the issue would be highly appreciated.

Edit: login to the PBS in the terminal did not work, in the browser the web page is also blank
Edit: stopping the PBS VM and then starting it again gave me a working login prompt and the ext4 message no longer appears. Still, it feels like something is wrong with my setup.

 

[Chris]

Self referencing backup of the VM is not recommended, I would suggest to exclude the PBS VM from the backup job and create a dedicated job just for the PBS VM, but using a different backup target storage. Depending on what you would like to have included in that backup, the disk located on the removable drive could then be excluded from the backup job. In general, the recommended approach is to sync backups to an offsite PBS instance via sync jobs https://pbs.proxmox.com/docs/managing-remotes.html#sync-jobs

 

[Bastian987]

Thanks a lot for your answer, Chris! I will separate the PBS backup job accordingly. But if I get it correctly I should for example use a second USB disc (of course, the offsite copy is the best version) for it to backup the PSB without the current PBS external storage. For my home lab, backing up the PBS itself doesn't seem that critical, I wonder whether I could also spend the time to set the PBS up again (the initial setup took me maybe an hour) in case my hardware breaks.

 

[Chris]

Thanks a lot for your answer, Chris! I will separate the PBS backup job accordingly. But if I get it correctly I should for example use a second USB disc (of course, the offsite copy is the best version) for it to backup the PSB without the current PBS external storage. For my home lab, backing up the PBS itself doesn't seem that critical, I wonder whether I could also spend the time to set the PBS up again (the initial setup took me maybe an hour) in case my hardware breaks.

Well, your actual goal is to be able to restore backups.

So if your PBS VM is located on the PVE host, and your PVE host breaks, you have no easy way of restoring the PBS VM and therefore any backup crated on it. Therefore, creating a dedicated backup for the PBS VM in order to be able to restore it is what you probably want (you could of course also re-install on a new instance and add the datastore located on the external drive).