How to create hourly backup for a proxmox vm on PBS?

[kumarullal]

Hi,
First of all congratulations on coming out with a fantastic solution. I installed PBS on a physical server and setup a backup storage and added it to my Proxmox ve node.
From the GUI it gives you the same options are vzdump backup. You can only select days and time for a automatic backup to run. The first backup is of course a full backup, which takes time. But the subsequent incremental backups happen in seconds. The trouble i that it only backs up once a day like vzdump, but incrementally. In PBS gui, on the storage, if we select a vm backup, check the pruning options for that backup, I can specify retention policy that includes daily, hourly , monthly and yearly, but there is no way to configure the backup schedule to hourly or every half hour etc.
I saw somewhere in the documentation that on PBS the is a command "proxmox-backup-server" with "--gc-schedule" option. However, there are re are no examples on how to use it. If there are a few examples of using the "proxmox-backup-server" command options to backup hourly, monthly and yearly , that would be great.
For now, I just want to try running hourly backups, and maintaining last 6 hourly backups.
How do I do that?

 

[villain666]

Hi,
First of all congratulations on coming out with a fantastic solution. I installed PBS on a physical server and setup a backup storage and added it to my Proxmox ve node.
From the GUI it gives you the same options are vzdump backup. You can only select days and time for a automatic backup to run. The first backup is of course a full backup, which takes time. But the subsequent incremental backups happen in seconds. The trouble i that it only backs up once a day like vzdump, but incrementally. In PBS gui, on the storage, if we select a vm backup, check the pruning options for that backup, I can specify retention policy that includes daily, hourly , monthly and yearly, but there is no way to configure the backup schedule to hourly or every half hour etc.
I saw somewhere in the documentation that on PBS the is a command "proxmox-backup-server" with "--gc-schedule" option. However, there are re are no examples on how to use it. If there are a few examples of using the "proxmox-backup-server" command options to backup hourly, monthly and yearly , that would be great.
For now, I just want to try running hourly backups, and maintaining last 6 hourly backups.
How do I do that?

Create new crontab job by hand (as example use disabled backup job from interface PVE)

*/30 * * * * root vzdump 102 11003 .......
example for half-hour vzdumps

 

[DerDanilo]

It would be nice though if this was integrated into the UI for easy configuration. Even if it was a Cron style schedule field.

 

[rholighaus]

Maybe a notation similar to the one in ZFS sync?

 

[kumarullal]

Create new crontab job by hand (as example use disabled backup job from interface PVE)

*/30 * * * * root vzdump 102 11003 .......
example for half-hour vzdumps

Thank you @villain666 I will try it out

 

[kumarullal]

Create new crontab job by hand (as example use disabled backup job from interface PVE)

*/30 * * * * root vzdump 102 11003 .......
example for half-hour vzdumps

I wanted to clarify one thing. When we use the GUI in pve, there is a file vzdump created in /etc/cron.d with a symlink, pointing to /etc/pve/vzdump.cron
So Are you saying that I create another backup job in PVE using the GUI and select the same storage and VM tobackup everyday, and then uncheck it so that the backup is not used and then manually edit the /etc/pve/vzdump.cron and modify the second entry as per my needs?
Or I just create a new file in /etc/cron.d/ and call it anythng with the entry that I need?

 

[villain666]

I create new cronjob-file in /etc/pve/ and link to /etc/cron.d/ (on every host in cluster)

 

[kumarullal]

I create new cronjob-file in /etc/pve/ and link to /etc/cron.d/ (on every host in cluster)

Thank you.

 

[powersupport]

I create new cronjob-file in /etc/pve/ and link to /etc/cron.d/ (on every host in cluster)

Will this job be shown up in GUI and Task Manager? If not, any workaround to being shown in the task manager at least?

 

[Peter123]

No, unfortunately not, as all of the above suggestions result in the GUI no longer showing any scheduled time at all.

Actually, the integration into the GUI for the Proxmox developers shouldn't be a big problem, right?

 

[oversite]

No, unfortunately not, as all of the above suggestions result in the GUI no longer showing any scheduled time at all.

Actually, the integration into the GUI for the Proxmox developers shouldn't be a big problem, right?

you are aware of it's being open source right? i know patches are always welcome. It's very easy for someone not doing it saying it's easy.

 

[che]

Actually, the integration into the GUI for the Proxmox developers shouldn't be a big problem, right?

It is probably not, but their resources are limited... And there are things with higher priority. I mean have you seen how much stuff is going on on the devel mailing lists...

 

[stefanobertoli]

Look like stupid, in my opinion, if you don't want to put your hand in cron files, just set multiple backup jobs in GUI, each one at the hour you need

 

[ProxmoxFan]

I know this has been asked for already, but just adding my vote for being able to do this through the GUI. And if directly editing the CRON job is still the way to go, then at least don't break the GUI - as soon as I edited the vzdump file, the schedule disappeared from the GUI. The sad part is this is already working in the Tape backup section of Proxmox Backup Server, but still not in the Datastore section.

 

[fabian]

https://bugzilla.proxmox.com/show_bug.cgi?id=2880

 

[Adamg]

Just tried out the proxmox backup server, loving it within 2 days, I'm very impressed with the speed after the initial backup and I love the remote sync option so that I can now start to have offsite backups too.

I found my way to this forum while trying to set up backups every hour of maybe every 15 mins since it works so well. I'd like to throw my vote in that it would be very nice if the GUI could accept cron like schedules. Thanks!