Backup Strategies (The Right Way to do It)?

[Chris Welber]

Hello Group,

I'm wondering how folks backup their Proxmox servers and VM's?

I noticed options appear at the Data Center and VM level, but not the server level. How do I setup backup storage, and what kinds of storage can it be: i.e. can I backup VM's from one server to another, how do I backup the actual server itself? Does this happen automatically in a cluster.

Any ideas, procedures or advice is greatly appreciated.

Thanks!

 

[sahostking]

Backups are not automated just happening when you have a cluster. You need to add storage for backups. So you need a third server if you have 2 Servers for example so that backups go to this third server. The most basic setup is probably using Freenas or nas4free or some nfs software and then creating backups via storage module in proxmox servers to the nfs server. Then create a backup schedule in proxmox for backups to run.

There are other ways like GlusterFS and Ceph which you can use but some also use R1soft I noticed on here which is also good. Bacula is another option which I personally prefer but some of these are too technical to start off with.

I'd recommend if you don't know much about backups to keep it simple so you don't struggle to setup the server or restore backups. Rather stick with NFS till you gain enough knowledge and setup a few test environments for the other backup methods and full understand them before choosing them

You could however also backup to a directory on the same server( But I personally would never recommend that) If the server dies or raid dies you could loose everything including backups.

Note all this is just my opinion and stand corrected. There are far more experienced folk on here I hope that would comment on this with more experience than me.

 

[mir]

Any ideas, procedures or advice is greatly appreciated.

The simplest and easiest solution would be to buy a cheap Qnap or Synology NAS and at this to promox as backup storage; either using NFS or iSCSI to access the NAS. NFS is by far the most simple to configure.