Does PBS try to BU itself?

[dpearceFL]

I have PBS as a VM in my PVE cluster. The PBS VM has two drives: One for the OS and one for the the backups. When I define the backup schedule, I exclude the PBS VM itself so it does not try to backup the backup files, creating a loop.

Is this necessary? It there a better way to do this?

 

[Lukas Wagner]

If you backup a VM, all disks that are configured will be backed up - unless it is a physical disk that is passed through.
How did you set up the storage for your PBS VM? Is the backup disk a virtual disk, or did you pass-through a physical block device?

Is this your only backup? Because backing up to the same physical host is not exactly best practice.

 

[dpearceFL]

I should have explained this is not a production system, but in my homelab which I use test how things work and to learn.

The 1 TB backup disk is a virtual disk hosted on on an NFS share on a separate TrueNAS box.

What I have learned so far:

• PBS will try to back all virtual disks up, including the backups themselves if mounted on the PBS server itself.
• The PBS VM need no less than 4 vCPUs at a minimum, 8 vCPUs would be better.
• PBS should be on it's own PVE server with minimal other VMs
• The PBS deduplication is very good.

Still learning.

 

[Einar Stenberg]

I should have explained this is not a production system, but in my homelab which I use test how things work and to learn.

The 1 TB backup disk is a virtual disk hosted on on an NFS share on a separate TrueNAS box.

What I have learned so far:

• PBS will try to back all virtual disks up, including the backups themselves if mounted on the PBS server itself.
• The PBS VM need no less than 4 vCPUs at a minimum, 8 vCPUs would be better.
• PBS should be on it's own PVE server with minimal other VMs
• The PBS deduplication is very good.

Still learning.

What you could do is remove the checkbox on the data-disk attached to your PBS vm called "Backup", this will exclude this disk from the backup.
But you could still include the OS disk for instance to keep a copy of the config? (though do not do it this way in production , you could end being unable to recover stuff if something goes wrong) Separate box for PBS is best, potentially, if your truenas box has the resources, maybe the best would be to run PBS in docker on the truenas box directly, that way you are eliminating the problem altogether.
Here is alink to a community docker image I have used with great success in the past; https://github.com/ayufan/pve-backup-server-dockerfiles