Backup PVE host and mounted ZFS storage

[moxiprox]

Hello,

sorry to ask such a question, but I'm little lost how to manage my PVE Backup. Maybe someone could give me an advice how to do that the right way.

I have an PVE with one single SSD with ZFS. It stores the rpool/.

Then I have a ZFS Raid on other drives as data storage for VMs, container (storage/container, storage/VMs) and data pools (storage/data/...) used by different container, it's mounted on the PVE Host to storage/...

The container / VMs often use the data pools as bind mounts (therefore snapshotting via PVE GUI not possible).

There's the need to backup:
- PVE Host (config...)
- ZFS storage with container, VMs and data pools

With PBS I was able to backup the container and VMs in the PVE GUI. Thats OK. But I was not able to backup the storage ZFS. With proxmox-backup-client on PVE I didn't manage to backup the ZFS in a good way. It should be possible to backup the ZFS but as far as I know there are only full backups of the whole ZFS in a compressed file possible. Better would be to use ZFS snapshots and send / receive.

I would like to have all backup things in one hand, e.g. PBS.

Basically I could do manual snapshots of all ZFS pools and then send / receive to another site. Would that possible with PBS?

How did you implement backups with similar PVE configuration?

Thanks a lot for your help!

 

[Dunuin]

With proxmox-backup-client on PVE I didn't manage to backup the ZFS in a good way. It should be possible to backup the ZFS but as far as I know there are only full backups of the whole ZFS in a compressed file possible. Better would be to use ZFS snapshots and send / receive.

You can use the proxmox-backup-client to backup any file, folder or block device. So yes, you can use that to backup your PVE configs (like backing up the "/etc" folder). And PBS backups are always deduplicated so it won't waste space.

Using "zfs send | zfs recv" of cause is another option to do it. But in that case your backup storage needs to be a ZFS pool as well.

Basically I could do manual snapshots of all ZFS pools and then send / receive to another site. Would that possible with PBS?

No, PBS is storage agnostic and therefore not making use of any ZFS features. But nothing will prevent you from manually creating a ZFS dataset on your PBS (as long as you use ZFS there as well) and then sending your ZFS snapshots there. But this then all has to be done by you via CLI or some custom scripts.

How did you implement backups with similar PVE configuration?

Systemd service running a bash script that uses the proxmox-backup-client to backup the folders I want to be backed up ("/root", "/var/lib/vz", "/etc", "/var/lib/pve-cluster/" and so on).
In addition to that a Debian Linux on a USB stick I can boot into to use the proxmox-backup-client to backup the whole system disks on block level while they are not in use.