Incremental backups to rotating USB drives

[fussel132]

Hello,

so after some research I was not able to find a good solution for what is a rather simple situation:

I've worked with Veeam in the past and for the setup I always had two or three external USB drives where one of them was connected to the server and the other one(s) were locked up or at another location (to keep data even on theft/physical destruction). Veeam would then incrementally back up HyperV VMs to the connected drive and once or twice a week these drives were swapped with each other.

Is it possible to create something similar with PBS? The best solution I could think of right now would be to configure fstab to auto-mount the drives when connected to for example /mnt/drive1 and /mnt/drive2, create two datastores (Drive1 and Drive2) and then on PVE create a backup job for each datastore. But I'd expect to get errors as there would always be one backup job which could not run as the datastore is offline. Or will PVE count the backup to the PBS instance as successful if one of the jobs succeeded? I don't think that's how it works though...

Is there a more elegant solution (or a solution for this at all)?

Thanks in advance!

 

[dakralex]

As you already expected, the backup jobs will fail as the storage (in this case the pbs datastores) are unavailable. Would this post [1] of another forum member be a solution to your problem?

[1] https://forum.proxmox.com/threads/rotated-drive-backup-workflow.90992/post-583754

 

[Chris]

Hi,

Is it possible to create something similar with PBS? The best solution I could think of right now would be to configure fstab to auto-mount the drives when connected to for example /mnt/drive1 and /mnt/drive2, create two datastores (Drive1 and Drive2) and then on PVE create a backup job for each datastore. But I'd expect to get errors as there would always be one backup job which could not run as the datastore is offline. Or will PVE count the backup to the PBS instance as successful if one of the jobs succeeded? I don't think that's how it works though...

Hi,
in addition to the suggested solution linked to by @dakralex, what you could do is have a permanent datastore located on the PBS, with a rather limited retention period. Backups will be performed to that datastore and are easily accessible for fast restore. Add dedicated datastores for the USB disk and configure a local sync job [0], to pull the contents from the permanent local datastore to the datastore located on the removable drive. That can have a longer retention period and garbage collection settings, and you can filter which backup snapshots to sync to the disk. If you need a snapshot not available on the permanent local datastore, you can either add the removable datastore as storage to you PVE or sync the required backup snapshots back to the permanent datastore and restore from there.

Currently removable datastores are not supported, there is however already a patch series which will make that feature available in future versions, see [1].

[0] https://pbs.proxmox.com/docs/managing-remotes.html#sync-jobs
[1] https://lore.proxmox.com/pbs-devel/20240904141155.350454-1-h.laimer@proxmox.com/

 

[fussel132]

I have to admit @Chris solution [1] sounds the best/easiest, any way to track progress on that feature (I hope it comes really soon)?

In the meantime I might try the other two solutions but I expected native support for that in proxmox given it‘s a rather popular choice for securing backups even in larger businesses when there is no offsite backup server…

Thanks for the suggestions!