Backup to NFS/SAMBA vs PBS network traffic efficiency

[logui]

From the point of view of incremental backups/snapshots and efficiency of what is being transferred through the network, are there big differences between backing up Proxmox via NFS/SAMBA vs using Proxmox Backup Server? I understand the native Proxmox backup is very good.

The hardware I am planning to use for backups is ARM, therefore no native support for PBS or OMV, but I can setup NFS/SAMBA natively on Debian 12 ARM, thanks

 

[Johannes S]

Let's make an easy calculation. Let's suppose you have a VM or container with a disk size of 10 GB running something like paperless or jellyfin. Every day data is written to is (since new files are added to the app libaries) but already written data isn't changed much. Let's assume that any day around 100 MB of data of the VM is changed.
Now the native Proxmox backup is always a full backup so any backup will need to transfer around 10 GB to your ARM host.
For a PBS backup only new or changed data needs to be transferred so it's a lot less (since only 100 MB has changed).

Now please take the numbers with a grain of salt, they are just an example I made up. But the point should be clear: PBS will be way more efficient.
Depending on your network speed it might be that it doesn't matter much though.

 

[logui]

Let's make an easy calculation. Let's suppose you have a VM or container with a disk size of 10 GB running something like paperless or jellyfin. Every day data is written to is (since new files are added to the app libaries) but already written data isn't changed much. Let's assume that any day you upload around 100 MB of data of the VM is changed.
Now the native Proxmox backup is always a full backup so any backup will need to transfer around 10 GB to your ARM host.
For a PBS backup only new or changed data needs to be transferred so it's a lot less (since only 100 MB has changed).

Now please take the numbers with a grain of salt, they are just an example I made up. But the point should be clear: PBS will be way more efficient.
Depending on your network speed it might be that it doesn't matter much though.

Thank you