Difference in NFS storage to nas backup and PVE Backup Server running on VM of nas?

[Phone Guy]

I am trying to make a complete backup of my proxmox server, as I am about to upgrade its motherboard. I have a NFS mapped storage from my Synology to the Proxmox, which has daily backups of the 8 or 9 VMs I have running. Is running the PVE backup server software as a VM on my Synology a better solution? Does it backup more or more data? easier to restore?

I am not sure whats the best method here... After upgrading the motherboard in the server, I am assuming I will have to re-install proxmox (going from single cpu server to a dual cpu server board). I essentially want to replace exactly what I have running now as smoothly as possible, not sure what method that is. Can anyone advise me?

 

[Dunuin]

Easier to restore is a simple vzdump backup as you just need the point PVE to those backup files and it can restore that guest. But when using PBS you can't restore anything without a working PBS. But PBS is more advanced and will consume way less space and backups will be faster, as it supports deduplication and inremental backups.

 

[UdoB]

PVE backup server software as a VM on my Synology a better solution?

That's what I do. With local loop from that VM to Synology-Host via NFS.

Pro:

• PVE-independent hardware
• all great features of PBS

Contra:

• it is slow - NFS is not really recommended and my Synology uses Raid6

Works for me...


Edit: this does not work for the host itself out-of-the-box. For that one you need to fiddle around a little bit...

 

[JohnnyBravo1212]

Easier to restore is a simple vzdump backup as you just need the point PVE to those backup files and it can restore that guest. But when using PBS you can't restore anything without a working PBS. But PBS is more advanced and will consume way less space and backups will be faster, as it supports deduplication and inremental backups.

Thanks that was helpful.

 

[Dunuin]

I also run a PBS VM on my TrueNAS server and think its the superior backup solution. But keep in mind that PBS needs a good storage. It doesn't need alot of CPU or RAM (2 vCPUs + 2GB will be fine for just a simple homeserver maybe storing below 1TB of backups) but PBS was designed with local SSD only storage in mind. Everything will be stored as millions of small deduplicated chunk files and each time you do a maintaince task like a GC or verify job will will need to read all those millions of files and that not just as sequential reads but in a random pattern. Thats why your storage needs alot of IOPS so HDDs and/or network shares aren't great. It will work but a GC or verify job might take hours or even days to finish. In case you can create virtual disks on your Synology and directly use them with your VMs without NFS/SMB I would try to use that so you prevent that overhead caused by the network share stack. And SSD caching of metadata can help alot when running PBS from HDDs in case your synology supports such a thing.

Vzdump is way more HDD friedly as it basically only sequentially reads/writes a single big file. But backups aren't done differentially, like for example Veeam would do it, so storing 10 daily backups of a 100GB VM that changes only 1GB per day might consume 1TB of space while PBS might just need something like 110GB. So vzdump wastes alot of space in case you want to store more than one backup per guest.