Backup of VMs to VM

[Das_Pflanze]

Hi everyone,

i'm new here but not new to Proxmox. I've a simple Proxmox install with 4 VMs, with one of them beeing a FreeNAS instance with a passed through HBA. Another one is a Ubuntu Server with Docker. Everything works fine except for backups. On the Ubuntu Server runs a CrashPlan Docker container which accesses the FreeNAS shares over NFS and backups them to CrashPlan Online.

Now I would like to create backups of the VMs on Proxmox that then will be also backuped to CrashPlan Online.

I already tried to create a NFS Share on FreeNAS which I then mounted in Proxmox and on the Ubuntu Server. But as soon as Proxmox starts to create a backup of the FreeNAS VM said VM freezes.

Is there another way to achieve backups of a VM that will be than backuped again by another vm? I know it sounds funny...

Thank you for your time and - hopefully - help!

 

[Stefan_R]

If you pass through your HBA to the FreeNAS VM, you will not be able to back it up onto the disks attached to the HBA. You can exclude the FreeNAS instance from your Backup schedule and back that one up to another drive.

You could also look into backing FreeNAS up from within the VM, I'm sure theres "self-backup" solutions for FreeNAS available. This would not receive support from Proxmox however.

 

[Das_Pflanze]

Is it possible to save the Backups on the Proxmox Host and access them via NFS or something like that? Then I could mount the NFS share in Ubuntu and so on.
Probably there is a "self-backup" solution for FreeNAS but that's not as simple as restoring a Proxmox backup in case the host goes down.

 

[Stefan_R]

Saving backups locally is easily possible, simply select your local storage as backup target. You can find local backups in '/var/lib/vz/dump/'.

Hosting an NFS share on Proxmox is not directly supported, although possible. I would suggest following the regular NFS setup procedure for a Debian system. If you want an easier solution, you could also use something like sshfs.