Is it enough to snapshot the datasets containing vm disks?

[soupdiver]

I have a daily scheduled backup configured through proxmox but I wondered if it's enough to create a zfs snapshot of the datasets containings the vm disks?
Is Proxmox backup doing more than snapshotting and writing the compressed file in the end?

 

[bbgeek17]

https://www.oracle.com/database/technologies/rman-fra-snapshot.html#:~:text=Storage-based snapshot technologies serve,"backups" of the data.

https://www.veeam.com/blog/why-snapshots-alone-are-not-backups.html

https://www.dincloud.com/blog/why-snapshots-arent-backups

Hopefully your Backup is not stored on the same machine/disk as Proxmox dataset. If it is - then you might as well just do snapshots...

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Blockbridge : Ultra low latency all-NVME shared storage for Proxmox - https://www.blockbridge.com/proxmox

 

[soupdiver]

Thanks for the links but unfortunately nothing of that is specific for Proxmox. I was already assuming that something more might be done.. e.g fetching the current running state etc.

The links do have some bits of information but my question is not directly answered. Oracle database and Proxmox are different I guess

 

[leesteken]

I have a daily scheduled backup configured through proxmox but I wondered if it's enough to create a zfs snapshot of the datasets containings the vm disks?

It depends. "Enough" for what? Can you describe in more detail what you want to achieve with "a daily scheduled backup" besides keeping multiple versions of your data safe from accidents? And why kind of accidents do you want to be prepared for?

Is Proxmox backup doing more than snapshotting and writing the compressed file in the end?

It depends. If your configured storage is off-site then the data is also copied to a safe place in case you Proxmox burns down.

Also, the QEMU Guest Agent is used to do a filesystem freeze/flush before backing up the virtual disk. For some software additional operations need to be configured to make sure everything is flushed to disk. Again, it depends on the operating system and software used inside the VM.