How to backup a VM using PBS ?

[umar9]

Hello Everyone,
I was very impressed with proxmox backup solution and I installed it but unfortunately I am struggling with creating / setting up a VM backup using PBS.

I want to setup a backup of a VM located at some external server (VM is setup using KVM/QEMU not PVE on external server). How can I do that in the PBS ? I cant see any option using GUI and even with command line using "proxmox-backup-client" it does not say how to do that in the documentation here: https://pbs.proxmox.com/docs/backup-client.html OR i am unable to understand.

Can anyone please guide me exactly on how can I achieve this?

Thanks a lot!!

 

[CAHEKs]

I think, you can use file-based backup (install client to the vm)

 

[umar9]

Well, PBS has promising feature to backup VM's containers and physical hosts... So I would like to know what is the correct way of doing that as I cant find anything clearly. Its all seems confusing and there is no much support on internet about it yet since PBS is still fairly new.

 

[aaron]

Right now the way PVE backs up a running VM is done by adding PVE specific patches to Qemu. Those patches are not (yet?) part of the upstream Qemu project. That is why you cannot use the VM based backup to PBS as you have it with PVE with a generic Qemu/KVM installation.

 

[umar9]

So its safe to assume that right now PBS only works with PVE for VM/container/physical-hosts backup and cannot backup VM's if the VM is on some server not using PVE ?

 

[aaron]

As far as I am aware. For those cases you will have to use file based backups on the host / in the VM/container using the proxmox-backup-client.