New Backup Targets for Existing PBS Server Instances: Best Practices for SOHO Environments?

[SInisterPisces]

Apologies in advance for the very "Hi, I'm definitely a newbie" question.

Hello,

I have an existing PBS server up and running, with a single datastore that backs up an existing (single-node) Proxmox cluster. The backing storage is a fast but small ZFS mirror on a pair of enterprise SATA SSDs.

I can now add new physical storage to my PBS server. It's a slower, but much larger, HDD ZFS pool. What I'd like to do is have the fast storage be the destination for the actual backup from the PVE cluster, so I can get the backups done on live VM and LXC instances as quickly as possible.

Actual question: What I'd like to do then is have the backups copy to (sync to?) a datastore that uses the HDD-based storage. (That way I don't have to worry about how fast it is, because it's not reading directly from the PVE cluster.) On the PBS-side of things, how do I set this up?

• I assume the HDD-backed storage is its own datastore; but
• All the docs assume syncing to a remote PBS instance, not a separate datastore on the same instance?
• So, I guess what I'm really asking is how to sync between two datastores on the same server.

Thanks!

 

[Neobin]

Since PBS 3.1, one can choose "Local" for the source "Location" while adding/creating a (pull) sync job.

 

[Johannes S]

You could also at localhost as remote.

One thing to consider: HDDs performance is quite bad. It can me mitigated by adding a SSD mirror as special device. But one thing to consider: If the special device is broken, the whole pool is toast:

https://pbs.proxmox.com/docs/sysadmin.html#zfs-on-linux

 

[SInisterPisces]

Thanks!

@Neobin I completely missed this feature. I'll try it this way.

@Johannes S Thanks for the warning. I'm not too worried about this. I have an 8 disk (4 mirror) HDD array, so I expect to be able to get at least 4-6 Gbps on write to the pool.

For an archival job from the fast SSD pool (that does the backup) to the cold mass storage that holds a second local copy, that should be fast enough, especially for delta backups.

The backup I care about being fast is the current one, that backs up on to an (enterprise) SATA HDD mirror. It's very performant from my tests so far. Certainly more than enough for a home/home office environment.