Offsite-Backup by Customer

[Stefan_Malte_Schumacher]

Hi,

We are using Proxmox V7 in Combination mit Proxmox-Backup-Server2. Now one of our customers contacted me and expressed the wish to be able to download backups on a regular basis as they did with their old provider. Is this even possible with the current version of Backup-Server? I have never asked but to my understanding creating backups with Backup Server works like this: The VE server creates a snapshot of a running vm which is then copied to the backup server and deduplicated and compressed. In this case one could not simply download the files stored on the server via sftp (her suggestion) as they would be incomplete. Did I understand the process correctly? Is there any way this would work? I would prefer a second backup server in another location, but I am not sure if the customer is willing to pay the costs.

Thanks in advance for your advice
Stefan

 

[Dunuin]

You are right. Without a running PBS the backup files will be useless. But you can download and backup the complete datastore folder. As long as you got that complete datastore folder you can use it to create a new PBS. So that can be a way to backup your backups but it would be really bad in terms of availability because you would need to get a new server, setup a new PBS installation, upload the complete datastore, manually edit the config files to use the old datastore and only then you can start to restore your VMs/LXCs. So would be better to just get another PBS server in another datacenter and setup a sync job.

 

[fabian]

you can also use the client to download the raw image files (for VMs) or pxar archives (for CTs/host backups) and the config blobs - but those can't be fed straight into PVE like a regular backup. might still be an option for "put stuff for disaster recovery on external drive in a safe" kinda scenarios

 

[DerDanilo]

Had a similar case. We simply went ahead creating the good old vzdump Backups (slower but working fine) once a week, giving the customer read access to those to sync whenever they want to. Of course the customer has to pay for the additional, inefficient Backup storage.
Maybe this is also an option for you.

 

[Stefan_Malte_Schumacher]

Had a similar case. We simply went ahead creating the good old vzdump Backups (slower but working fine) once a week, giving the customer read access to those to sync whenever they want to. Of course the customer has to pay for the additional, inefficient Backup storage.
Maybe this is also an option for you.

Hi

This sounds good. In fact the customer already wrote that weekly backups would be more than sufficent. Would you be so kind as to make a screenshot of your configuration? I can't seem to find the right option under Datacenter - > Backup which backup type to use. Where do you store the additional backups? I wouldn't want to store directly in /var/lib/vz of the PVE - which is available only to selected IPs only anyway for security reasons. I have of course additional space under other plain Debian Systems (No PVE) and probably could buy additional storage space at Hetzner, which I would prefer.

Yours sincerely
Stefan

 

[Dunuin]

You can use a directory storage in case you want to use a local disk or ZFS dataset. A NFS/SMB share would work too. I think hetzner got a SMB storage for backups that should work.

"Stop" mode backups would be more consistent but your guest will be shortly shutdown for that so not great for availability. With "Snapshot" mode backups you guest will keep running but restoring such a backup is like booting it after an power outage so your processes are like crashed while running (but a fsfreeze will make sure that cached data will be written to disk first).

Vzdump backups are also not incremental so you need alot of storage of you want to store multiple of them per guest. But if they are just there to be downloaded on a weekly basis you could set it up to only keep 1 backup per guest. But I think you still need the space for two backups because pruning is done after creatung the new backup.

 

[Stefan_Malte_Schumacher]

Vzdump backups are also not incremental so you need alot of storage of you want to store multiple of them per guest. But if they are just there to be downloaded on a weekly basis you could set it up to only keep 1 backup per guest. But I think you still need the space for two backups because pruning is done after creatung the new backup.

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Pardon me for repeating my stupid question but where can I set individual backups to a) different storages modes (vzdump) and b) different locations? This is the only menu I have which remotely fits, but it is set on datacenter level.

Cheers
Stefan

 

[Dunuin]

Jep, you need to add a storage at "datacenter -> storage". Only a storage of type "Proxmox Backup Server" can be used for PBS backups. Storages of types like CIFS/NFS/Directory can be used for Vzdump backups if you select "Vzdump" as content type for that storage.