Best External Backup Drive[s] for a Proxmox Server?

[naupe]

Recently I set up a Dell PowerEdge R710 Server hosting Proxmox and shipped it to a friend to house and run: I simply didn't have the space (and am moving) so preferred he hosted it instead of myself.

However, he's not the most Linux-minded and we still need a method to backup to Server. So I was wondering:

• Is there any External Drives on the Market that are already formatted to work with Proxmox? If so, any you guys would recommend for a Server?
• If not, is there any External Drive you recommend formatting to work with Proxmox, and what would the steps I need to follow to format such an External Drive properly?

I admit I was a fool not to have an External Drive already pre-formatted to mount with Proxmox when I sent the Server to him, but hindsight is 20/20 I suppose.
I do have external access to login to the Server thankfully, so I can handle all of that once the External Drive is physically connected to the Server.

 

[Dunuin]

If you got an old computer you don't need anymore I would suggest you install proxmox backup server on it and run it at home. That way the PVE could send incremental and deduplicated backups to your PBS and you got a free offsite backup. And you don't need to run the PBS 24/7. You could tell the PVE to only backup sundays at 8PM, start your PBS short before it and shut it down afterwards. Or use a timer switch to do it automatically. I'm sure there would be some way to script something thats automatically shutsdown the PBS after the PVE has finished the backup.
A PBS would also save a lot of space. My BPS only uses 142GB to store 11TB of VM backups using the magic of deduplication. And internet bandwith shouldn't be such a big problem because PBS can do incremental backups. With vzdump you need to send and store the whole VM again and again what takes forever and wastes alot of space. PBS only needs to store everything once and then just updates what has been changed since the last backup. So the first backup will take long but all backups after that are really fast. PBS will work with just 2-4GB of RAM so even a old laptop or thin client would work as a PBS host.

 

[naupe]

Thank you for answering @Dunuin, but there's a couple problems with this suggestion:

1. I am basically living in a Residence Inn temporarily until I can find a new place (long story), so I have no place to keep a dedicated-running Proxmox Backup Server.
2. More importantly, the Dell PowerEdge Server is no longer with me, my friend has it at his home. And, as a reminder, he has very little Linux knowledge: I wouldn't trust him to try and setup a Proxmox Backup Server.

Wish I would have thought of it at the time, but I didn't, and now the PowerEdge Server is in another state. The only real solution I can think of is for him to buy an External Drive, connect it and from there partition it and do manual VM backups (to start) and (later) find a way to backup Proxmox to it.

I recently found this step-by-step guide. It's the best guide I've found so far on the subject of partitioning and adding an External Drive for Proxmox to recognize. The challenge right now is finding an External Drive that my PowerEdge R710 (and Proxmox) will recognize. Any suggestions?