New to Proxmox - Questions about DR

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Livewire

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Jul 9, 2024
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I am a recent convert after leaving VMWare for my home lab. I have Proxmox 8.2 installed and am LOVING IT so far. It has been a bit of a learning curve, but I have been in IT for over 25 years so picking it up quickly. I have my web server and a second server currently setup and running and have configured firewall rules them as well. Now, I am getting past the testing phase and want to make sure I have good backups. I have configured an NFS share from my Synology NAS, configured it for backups, and ran a backup for both servers. However, I am wondering what a restore would look like in the event of a Node failure? I am not running a cluster, as this is just my home lab. So, in the event of multiple failures which took out the Proxmox VE environment and the VM disks, how I restore the environment? I mean, I don't see a way to backup the Proxmox VE node configuration, so I assume I would need to rebuild everything from scratch (including Firewall rules) and then add the NFS backup mount, and then what? How would I tell Proxmox the backups exist and initiate a restore? Also, can I do a full recovery from snapshot backup, or do I need to do a "stop" backup allow for a full restore?

Hope this makes sense, and thanks in advance for any help.
 
Livewire said:
mean, I don't see a way to backup the Proxmox VE node configuration, so I assume I would need to rebuild everything from scratch
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Host Backups are still on the roadmap (for years). You might want to use third-party backup tools for this or some config-backup-scripts from github. Always a good idea to have a recent backup of the "/etc" folder and maybe "/var/lib/vz".
Livewire said:
(including Firewall rules)
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Firefall rules of guests are included in the VM/LXC backups. Whats not included are datacenter/host rules as well as security groups, IP sets and aliases.

Livewire said:
and then add the NFS backup mount, and then what? How would I tell Proxmox the backups exist and initiate a restore?
Click to expand...
After adding the NFS share as a storage you go to the backup tab, it will see the backup archives, you select the backup and restore it.

Livewire said:
Also, can I do a full recovery from snapshot backup, or do I need to do a "stop" backup allow for a full restore?
Click to expand...
You can but it is like booting a VM after a power outage as the VMs RAM isn't backed up. Make sure to install the QEMU guest agent in all VMs or otherwise the guests write cache won't be flushed before taking the snapshot and the snapshot-mode backup won't be consistent.

You might also want think about getting a dedicated server for backups using PBS. This will save tons of space, will allow you to take fast incremental backups, allows live restore and adds stuff like ransomware protection. Way superior to VZDump but ideally you want a dedicated host with SSD-only backup storage. PBS datastore on HDDs or NFS will work too but is terribly slow.
 
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Dunuin said:
Host Backups are still on the roadmap (for years). You might want to use third-party backup tools for this or some config-backup-scripts from github. Always a good idea to have a recent backup of the "/etc" folder and maybe "/var/lib/vz".

Firefall rules of guests are included in the VM/LXC backups. Whats not included are datacenter/host rules as well as security groups, IP sets and aliases.


After adding the NFS share as a storage you go to the backup tab, it will see the backup archives, you select the backup and restore it.


You can but it is like booting a VM after a power outage as the VMs RAM isn't backed up. Make sure to install the QEMU guest agent in all VMs or otherwise the guests write cache won't be flushed before taking the snapshot and the snapshot-mode backup won't be consistent.

You might also think about getting a dedicated server for backups using PBS. This will save tons of space, will allow you to take incremental backups and adds stuff like ransomware protection. Way superior to VZDump but ideally you want a dedicated host with SSD-only backup storage.
Click to expand...
Thanks so much for the info and super quick response!
 
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