Is a setup of Proxmox Backup on the PVE system always 'wrong'?

[gctwnl]

I am running a NUC with PVE and a few VMs (just one for now). The NUC has an internal 1TB NVMe disk (with PVE and VM) and an external 2TB SATA SSD RAID (for data). I would like to add Proxmox backup to the PVE and backup the VM to a volume to the external raid. I also want to have my VMs data on the external RAID and back that up to the internal NVMe. And I will add some off site backup to that later (especially for the data), if need be I can rebuild the VM on a new NUC.

The Proxmox backup documentation which I've been reading warns against having Proxmox Backup and PVE on the same system. Apart from the fact that if a single system or a single disk dies and you've lost everything, is there another reasons why you should not do that? Because with the data distribution I have planned that scenario seems to be handled and if I add off site data backup it seems OK to me.

 

[Matthias.]

Restoring a broken PBS/PVE will be difficult if it's the same machine.

Again, it's not recommended, but it should work, IIRC several people on the forum have this setup.

 

[aaron]

if I add off site data backup it seems OK to me.

This makes all the difference. If you only have the one server where everything is on, you will not be safe against certain HW failures. Once you have other PBS instances to which you sync your backups to, the one server can die completely, and you still have recent backups somewhere else.

It all comes down to what is acceptable in your situation. The documentation recommends the safest option

 

[Dunuin]

Its also a good idea to do a vzdump backup of your PBS VM/LXC to a external disk or NAS. In case you need to reinstall PVE, you can then restore the PBS VM/LXC first from the archive on the external disk/NAS. with PBS then running you can restore the remaining guests from PBS.

But as far as I know PVE host backups are on the todo list. With the PBS on the PVE you of cause would lose the ability to backup your PVE host.
So not a big deal yet, but big downside in the future when this feature gets added.

Also don't forget to backup your PVE config files. Especially security groups, IPsets and aliases are really annoying to setup again, when you need to reinstall your PVE, as these won't be part of your guest backups. Lost encryption keys would be bad too.