Grandfather-father-son backup

[StephenW]

Hi

Just starting with Proxmox, got 3 PVE cluster and PBS up and running.
Backup policy is Grandfather-father-son backup, this does not seem
to be how PBS works?
Is it possible to do Grandfather-father-son backups with PBS?
Backups are also copied to another data center on a daily basis,
is this what Sync Jobs is for?

 

[fabian]

yeah, PBS doesn't work like that at all, since there are no differential snapshots, but every snapshot references the full data in the chunk store. you can configure pruning: https://pbs.proxmox.com/docs/maintenance.html#pruning to decide which snapshots to keep

sync jobs are the right tool for copying backups to another location.

 

[StephenW]

Thanks Fabian

May be a deal breaker for us using Proxmox Backup Server, not hopeful of getting a policy change.

 

[fabian]

if you are using tapes, then those have their own schedule and you can have multiple sets with different retention policies there:

https://pbs.proxmox.com/docs/tape-backup.html

you can of course also keep multiple copies using multiple sync jobs to different datastores (each datastore has its own chunk store), also locally within your system. most people don't want to store multiple copies of the same backup data on *one* system though, since it doesn't buy you much extra resilience but requires a lot more storage..

 

[VictorSTS]

You can use different namespaces in the same datastore for Grandfather, father and son backups, with different prune policies each, while maintaining PBS deduplication capabilities among them.

Such backup strategy feels to me obsolete when using PBS, given that in PBS all backups are full and you can sync any backup you want easily to an offsite PBS or to another kind of media (tape, USB drives, SAN, even S3 unofficially by using ).

 

[fabian]

but namespaces share the chunk store, so if you are worried about on-disk corruption, that is not a good fit, you'd need different datastores (or different PBS instances altogether with completely separate hardware).

 

[dietmar]

Thanks Fabian

May be a deal breaker for us using Proxmox Backup Server, not hopeful of getting a policy change.

GFS is a very clumsy way to organize backup, and only required if you have incremental/full backups.

Proxmox Backup Server give you automatic, fully duplicated backups, so you do not need GFS at all
(This is a great feature, not a deal breaker).

 

[StephenW]

It is a deal breaker because our customers insist upon it!

 

[fabian]

if your customer's insist on having multiple, independent copies of backup data then that is no problem - whether that's implemented with multiple datastores, multiple PBS instances, tapes, or a combination of all of that. I'd still recommend having those copies on different hardware/in different locations, and not all on a single PBS instance though. insisting on outdated approaches that don't make sense with new technology will leave you stuck with outdated technology - sometimes educating your customers/users is part of moving forward

 

[StephenW]

Hi

The education and persuasion is ongoing, but we are dealing with public sector bodies
a simple change to the backup policy can take over a year, assuming it gets passed
by all the committees.