New here, first setup, advice accepted

[Damianoo]

I created my first proxmox ve bare metal configuration.
I created a mirror pool consisting of 3 ssd sata disks, at the end of setup one of these three disks I put it offline use it in case of emergency.
I used one nvme disk for the VMs and a second nvme where I create periodic automatic backups of the VMs.
I passthrought the HBA on one of the VMs.
I created a script that does automatic periodic snapshots for me by leveraging the proxmox tool so that the snapshots it creates appear in the GUI.
I created a script that would automatically make periodic backups of my entire proxmox configuration (ip, vm, passthrought, personal folders, hosts, script folder, cron, etc).
I tried deleting the boot disks and performing a fresh installation of proxmox, manually mounted the two nvme disks and restored the backup; everything turns out to be fully functional.

Now I want to create a copy on an external usb disk of the backups and I need to configure sending the proxmox configuration to an external hosting/google one (via ssh or whatever) and periodically upload VM backups to the same space.

Do you have any suggestions for further improvement?

 

[aj@root]

Re: Your disks. Are they consumer grade or enterprise? If they're consumer grade, you're doing great because you have a hot spare, but keep in mind that drives from the same batch in a mirror config are somewhat likely to go bad around the same time.

Sounds like you've tested your recovery plan, so you're good there.

Have you considered the Proxmox Backup Server (PBS)?

It uses a block-based backup scheme that's has all of the advantages of full backups and incremental backups - even when encrypted.

Also, there are 3 different uses of the term "snapshot" throughout the documentation.
A VM snapshot is usually not what you want - as it captures the running state of the VM.
The backup in snapshot mode is usually what you want - this captures the block state of the VM, but not the RAM, and is easier to recover.
I can't remember the other at the moment, but I think it's not one that people make mistakes with as often.

Also, there's a backup scheduler built-in, even if you don't use PBS. It has options in the GUI for limiting bandwidth and resource usage and such - all the same as what you can do from the CLI, but will give you a nice survey of what's available.

There are options both at all of the Datacenter level, the Node level, and VM / LXC Level



I've been a big fan of CLI tools pretty much forever, but the Proxmox Web UI is incredibly useful. I don't ever feel "locked in" by it, and it's just so convenient.

Also: you know that Help button that we all have trained ourselves to ignore because it's absolutely worthless in every application we've ever tried it in? Well, in Proxmox it's actually helpful. You can actually learn valuable, real-world things from it. It's not "dumbed down" help. It's actual links to the manual, example configs, sometimes even really useful tools like the purge simulator.

 

[aj@root]

I'm a huge fan of PBS - in case that wasn't abundantly clear

If you're interested in learning more, here's two other posts I've done about it that have a few tidbits of uncommon wisdom - at least if you're not familiar with PBS, and maybe have common beliefs that held true in the EXT3 + HDD days that don't hold as true now:
- https://forum.proxmox.com/threads/serial-jobs-backups.164258/#post-759115
- https://forum.proxmox.com/threads/retention-policy-design-on-pbs.164257/#post-759111