[SOLVED] Can I use PBS to backup bare-metal or VM Debian or CentOS?

[Razva]

Hello,

Currently I'm using PBS for backing up my Proxmox small cluster, but I'm wondering.

Can I use PBS in order to backup bare-metal or VMs with Debian? What about CentOS?

Thanks!

 

[t.lamprecht]

Hi!

Can I use PBS in order to backup bare-metal or VMs with Debian? What about CentOS?

Yes, as long as it is relatively new the client will work there too. We're actually planning a specific package repository for only the client, for now you can manually download the proxmox-backup-client .deb package there and install it with apt install ./proxmox-backup-client*deb, works under Debian Buster and Ubuntu 20.x (and FWICT also upcoming 21.04).
I also did some proof of concept for building an RPM package, it worked fine on CentOS 8 here, albeit the RPM repos are something we're not used to work with, so for that we cannot make any promise.

For how to actually do a backup then, see the docs:
https://pbs.proxmox.com/docs/backup-client.html

 

[Razva]

Sounds great! Any hint from where I could get the CentOS 8 client? Thank you

 

[t.lamprecht]

Any hint from where I could get the CentOS 8 client? Thank you

For now, and from top of my head, you have the following three options available:

• extract the .deb there (in ancient times I even used a deb to rpm tool, named alien IIRC, but no idea how good it works now).
• copy over the proxmox-backup-client binary, install the dependencies normally (libzstd, libfuse3, libacl, libattr, libssl IIRC)
• build the client yourself on that host, depending on how comfortable you're with rust that may be a bit much to do (there are threads in this forum documenting how to do so)

 

[Razva]

I'm thinking at an alternative. What would the performance penalty for not using bare-metal directly, but install Proxmox and run the OS as a single VM? This will help:

• with backups, as it'll be way more easy to manage everything
• with moving data from a box to another, when upgrading

What's your opinion on this?

 

[t.lamprecht]

There's some slight overhead, but IMO it's really not that big and weighting it against the benefits you listed makes it IMO definitively an option to consider.

It may depend a bit on the workload, e.g., if it needs to pass-through a specific hardware or the like, but in general I see not direct problem. So, I'd only recommend to first test if the VM performances as required, just to be sure.