How can I back up my VMs without slowing them down?

[GMer]

Hi everyone!
I’m trying to figure out the best way to back up several VMs and containers in Proxmox. I’d like to do it without slowing down the running machines or causing issues for users. Do you have any tips or strategies that work well? Are live backups with snapshots the way to go, or is there a better approach?
Thanks!

 

[phip]

You may want to enable "Backup fleecing", which directs writes during the backup to a local fast image to avoid slowing down guests: https://pve.proxmox.com/wiki/Backup_and_Restore#_backup_modes

 

[GMer]

Thanks, I’ll check out backup fleecing

 

[bitranox]

Backup fleecing in Proxmox is a write-cache layer for live VM backups that captures overwritten data in temporary local images, to protect guest performance when the backup target cannot keep up. But that only helps if disk I/O is the bottleneck. You might also consider to additionally limit the bandwidth to the PBS if You backup over network. You need to identify the bottleneck first - is it disk ? is it network ? smth else ?