[SOLVED] Official way to backup proxmox VE itself?

[tomekszy]

Great solution, but I prefer to use the proxmox backup client instead of tar. The equivalent solution would then look like this:
proxmox-backup-client backup etc.pxar:/etc var_lib.pxar:/var/lib home.pxar:/home root.pxar:/root --exclude='var/lib/vz' --exclude='var/lib/snapd' --exclude='var/lib/apt' --exclude='var/lib/dpkg' --repository PBS-IP:Backup

I've done it exactly how you show it, and it works very good, also it doesn't have disatvantage of being only backup (without retention). Thanks!

 

[madbrain]

I'm looking for a way to do this live. I recently converted multiple hosts to Proxmox VMs. One is my pfSense router. Another is my Home assistant, which manages among other things, all the lights in my home. I have the VM backups taken care of. But I really need a way to backup Proxmox itself for disaster recovery purposes. Like another poster, I do have GPU passthrough configured from my AMD 5700G APU onto a Plex Media Server LXC container.

I can't afford to take down my entire Proxmox host in order to do a Proxmox OS backup, since that means I might temporarily be in the dark.
Also, I need something that can be restored easily and quickly for disaster recovery purposes.

The recovery cases are 2-fold . One is the eventual hardware failure of the 16 year old SATA-II 96GB Proxmox boot SSD.
The other is a software disaster, like an exploited security vulnerability, or a problem between chair and computer, ie. config change gone very wrong.

On my bare metal Windows host, I have been using a program called Acronis True Image. At 2am, it runs a WOL script to wake up my NAS, and does differential backups onto it.
If I ever need to restore my Windows OS (and god knows I do it many times), I boot from an Acronis boot recovery media, which has the 10 Gbps NIC drivers loaded, and NAS drive pre-mounted, and after a few clicks, the restore starts, including recreating the partition table and all the file systems on the disk of my choice.

I am hoping for some similar backup/restore workflow for OS backup/restore with Proxmox. I don't expect a GUI for this in the Linux world. I'm very comfortable with CLI. I have typed thousands of commands in the Proxmox CLI in the last 2 weeks since I installed it.

For the Proxmox OS backup, I would backup onto a local hotplug drive, rather than onto the NAS. The reason for this is that if Proxmox is down, my DHCP server will also be down, and the NAS will be offline too as a result, meaning I could not easily restore from the NAS without manually messing with its networking first.

My Proxmox host has 4 SATA hotplug front bays, which would allow easily replacing the boot SSD in case of hardware failure. The hotplug features also allows for backup targets.
So, is it possible to do a true live OS backup of the entire disk ? And if so, with what tool ?
And more importantly, how would it get restored ?

Ideally, I would also like to be able to initiate the restore from another host. Ie. in case of software snafu rather than hardware, to minimize the Proxmox downtime. I would use another computer with a USB SATA hotswap bay attached, insert a SATA SSD into it, and restore it onto the SSD. Then, bring the Proxmox host down temporarily, and swap the SATA SSD in the front drive bay. I have a bunch of spare small SATA SSDs for that purpose.