is the Proxmox snapshot and PBS backup same?

[powersupport]

Hi,

May I check if the Proxmox snapshot and PBS backup are the same? which one is better.

Recently, one of our VM got crashed and recovered from r1soft backup, the whole process took around 6 hours complete.

Does anyone have any recommendations for fast recovery

Thank you

 

[Dunuin]

Snapshots should be very fast to rollback but you got the downside that these are part of the storage so they are always part of the disk you store the guests on. So in case of a failed drive/pool you will loose your snapshots together with your guests so you still need a real backup on another disk or even better another offsite host. Snapshots of SSDs also consume the expensive SSD space and can't be stored on a cheaper HDD.

A good idea is to combine snapshots and backups to make use of the advantages of both. For exmple hourly snapshots that you only keep for 2 days (I like this script for that: https://github.com/Corsinvest/cv4pve-autosnap) and daily/weekly/monthly/annualy backups that you keep for months to years. That way you got a very fast and recent snapshot you can rollback to within 48 hours and a more save but slower real backup for long term archival.
If you want fast and space efficient backups you should setup a Proxmox Backup Server (PBS) instead of using the vzdump backups.