GC needed on PBS offsite?

[enoch85]

I run PBS sync to an offsite since a couple of weeks back. Everything runs well, but I'm a bit confused about which jobs are actually needed on the offsite?

The main PBS (on site) runs GC and Verify jobs, and I've setup so that the offsite PBS does the same, but is this really needed? I mean the main PBS has already verified and GC:ed everything once synced, right? I'm asking because I see this on the offsite, and it's always the same - 0 bytes to reclaim:

 

[enoch85]

Bonus question, do I really need to verify on the offsite since it's already verified on the main (on site) PBS?

 

[UdoB]

I mean the main PBS has already verified and GC:ed everything once synced, right?

Sure. It did that with the rules of the main PBS. The remote one may have heavily different rules!

Verifying is not required - but recommended, from time to time. (Weeks or months.) The reason should be clear: data is stored on mass storage devices. These may degrade over time.

The only way to check if correct data could be read from from disk is... doing this and verifying its integrity.

One (main?) use case of different configuration for local/remote is this: the local PBS is equipped with fast, but small SSDs/NVMe. It keeps backups only for a short amount of time, maybe days or weeks. The remote PBS is slow to reach but has a large amount of storage. Those backups are kept for a much longer period, months or years...

Note that "remote PBS" does not mean "in a different city", it may be put physically nearby, in the next server rack. The logic stays the same.

The main PBS (on site) runs GC and Verify jobs,

You did not explicitly mention "Prune", but that type of job is crucial.

GC will only remove Garbage if Prune has cleaned up the database of used/required chunks before. (At least 24h + 5minutes before.)

https://pbs.proxmox.com/docs/backup-client.html#pruning-and-removing-backups

 

[enoch85]

You did not explicitly mention "Prune", but that type of job is crucial.

In fact, the Proxmox server handles the pruning (retention), so that's done in the backup job itself.

Other than that, thanks a lot for your answer, now I will reschedule all my jobs.