Offline-Backup

[GrafZahl]

I have a Proxmox-Backup-Server running. Every night all my vms and lxcs are backed up to the PBS. What I am missing is a way to do offline backups. Currently I do once in a while a `zfs send | zfs receive`, but thats not optimal.

Can I somehow do offline-backups using my running pbs? I can setup push and pull-jobs but those need another running instance of PBS....

I hope you can give me some ideas how to achieve this.

Thanks a lot

 

[Johannes S]

You can use tape storage or add Extertal storage Devices ( e.G. USB Discs) as removable datastores

 

[SInisterPisces]

@Johannes S Add this to the list of features that I didn't know about until you mentioned them.

Like, I read about removable datastores in the PBS docs (https://pbs.proxmox.com/docs/storage.html), but somehow didn't connect that to using an external USB disk. I assumed it was only for sophisticated enterprise-level storage or something.

This is exciting, as I actually have an external enterprise SSD in a USB enclosure that would be a great fit for this.

It's interesting that the docs instruct that only ext4 or xfs should be used. I've never used either of those with PBS, but it makes sense that ZFS would be a bit much for a USB disk.

 

[GrafZahl]

You can use tape storage or add Extertal storage Devices ( e.G. USB Discs) as removable datastores

Thanks a lot. I'll give it a try with the external storage device.

 

[Johannes S]

It's interesting that the docs instruct that only ext4 or xfs should be used. I've never used either of those with PBS, but it makes sense that ZFS would be a bit much for a USB disk.

According to the docs any filesystem should work as long as it supports the needed POSIX attributes and is supported by the Linux Kernel. So BTRFS or ZFS would in fact work but then you would need to do a manually zfs import/export before and after using it:

They can be created on already correctly formatted partitions, which should be either <span>ext4</span> or <span>xfs</span> as with normal datastores, but most modern file systems supported by the Proxmox Linux kernel should work.

Note

FAT-based file systems do not support the POSIX file ownership concept and have relatively low limits on the number of files per directory. Therefore, creating a datastore is not supported on FAT file systems. Because some external drives are preformatted with such a FAT-based file system, you may need to reformat the drive before you can use it as a backing-device for a removable datastore.

https://pbs.proxmox.com/docs/storage.html#removable-datastores

Propably even one of the BSD file systems (like UFS) would work but AFIK Linux doesn't support them One should be weary of VFAT, Exfat or NTFS though. So propably best to stick with the recommended filesystems like ext4 or XFS.

I assumed it was only for sophisticated enterprise-level storage or something.

For me it was always the opposite My understanding was that it was for people who don't have the budget for a offsite PBS (but could have some external discs which they can store on a offsite place and swap them on a regular schedule) or need an air-gapped backups but don't want to use tapes (due do their comparatively slow performance). With other words: Most home users and small businesses. In my understanding for enterprise environments the idea is to use an offsite PBS, coupled with tape storage for air-gapped backups. Home users and small businesses usually don't have tape storage

Now the new S3 support changes this a little bit since S3 storage is actually used by homeusers and companies of all sizes

 

[GrafZahl]

Thanks again, I could set it up. It took me some cli-action, as I want the offline backup encrypted where the local backup isn't, but now its running
I did the encryption with a LUKS-layer under the fs.