New to pbs, questions about a backup system, with offsite storage

[aristide]

Hi,
I have been using Proxmox VE in my homelab (a few vms and containers on the host and a few Linux clients) for some years now, but never had a good and reliable backup system.

After having evaluated several solutions (Urbackup, Duplicaty and borg), I recently discovered Proxmox Backup, and I am pretty sure, that it could be a very well suited solution for all my needs.

As it is advised to have at least two copies (better three) of the backup data, and at least one of them off site, my plan is as follow:

1) backup the vms and containers to pbs (running as a vm on the host), and Linux clients with the Proxmox backup-client to pbs

I will add an external disk to the host, solely as a datastore for pbs (attached over esata but not an ssd), and add a second nfs based datastore to pbs to sync to (of a Synology that is just hanging around).

2) sync the datastore to cloud storage (rsync.net)

To achieve that, at least two options seems doable (but I am far away from being an expert):

a) add the rsync.net storage to pbs as a third datastore (sshfs-mountpoint) and sync to it
b) let the nas sync the data to rsync.net over rsync

I have read that sshfs can be slow and a) would obviously consume resources on the host when syncing. With b), I could let the nas (which won't be used for other tasks) sync the data during the day, and so have less impact on the host.

For now, I have less than 1TB to backup and I don't think I will need more in a near future.

Before I roll it out, I would like to get advice from experimented people and I thank in advance to anyone helping me on that project.

 

[chrf]

Hi,

I also want to backup my pbs in my homelab and I think of implementing one of the two options you described. A third option would be
to sync a complete datastore to rsync.net using borgbackup.

Did you already decide how to implement your backup?

 

[aristide]

Yes, I found a solution fitting my needs.

First, I bought a second hand Synology DS718+ (upgraded to 16GB ram). X86-based models (those with the +) allow running Docker, so I have set up a Docker container running PBS on the Synology and added it's datastore to pve as a backup target.

PBS as Docker container:
https://github.com/ayufan/pve-backup-server-dockerfiles?tab=readme-ov-file

That's working fine for the primary backup of my vms. On the Synology, everything is set up in one folder (docker files and volumes, backup files, docker-compose.yml, etc.). I duplicate this folder to an external disk attached to the Syno with the Hyperbackup app. This way, I have a second copy of my backups, and the PBS container could be easyly restored from the external disk on every machine running docker, within minutes (I would just need to adapt the path of the volumes in the docker-compose.yml file and fire up the container).

So far, the backups are not synced to rsync.net. With the Hyperbackup app, it is very easy to set up (I just did tests).

On the Syno, PBS could also be set up as a virtual machine (I also tried this), but it is not as easy to find out where the data is stored on the virtual disks, in order to replicate it.