Offsite Backup of PBS Chunks with borg

[Abridge4038]

Hi all,

I have seen different discussions on this forum about attempts to create offsite backups of the data stored in pbs to the cloud, but most of them seem problematic due to the high number of small chunks. However, I still find this approach attractive due to the affordability of remote storage services in comparison to renting an entire vps, that runs pbs and pulls the data.

Therefore I have been wondering if anyone has been able to perform remote offsite backups of pbs with borg, to a service like Hetzner storage box?

Thanks and best regards.

 

[Lukas Wagner]

Well, a PBS datastore is just plain files, so I don't see any reason why it should not work. Since the chunks created by PBS are already compressed, you can probably disable Borg's compression altogether to save some time.

 

[Abridge4038]

The reason I asked is, because I had tried it in the past with rclone sync on another cloud provider and it seemed quite shaky and slow due to the many small files. But I made a first attempt with borg on hetzner storage box today and it looks promising. Will expand it over time and see how it goes. Disabling compression sounds like a great idea.

 

[mac.linux.free]

Could someone point out the difference between borg and pbs remote sync?

 

[aaron]

A PBS remote sync needs a PBS running on the other side. Alternatively, one could try to mount the external store in the PBS instance and run a sync job locally (same PBS as remote) from the main datastore to the external mounted one. How good it performs is something that needs to be tested.

 

[Abridge4038]

A PBS remote sync needs a PBS running on the other side. Alternatively, one could try to mount the external store in the PBS instance and run a sync job locally (same PBS as remote) from the main datastore to the external mounted one. How good it performs is something that needs to be tested.

Thats a great idea, was about to create a second local pbs instance for this purpose. But basically I could attach two external disks to the same pbs instance, then add pbs to itself as a remote and sync from one disk to the other?

 

[mac.linux.free]

I'll test that, too. I think borg is doing better with seeds and local sync cache. It is much faster with big fileservers on lxc than the pbs-method.

 

[Abridge4038]

To give an update: Have been running it daily for around a week and looks good so far (The total size of backup files is around 250GB). At the initial upload I have sporadic "Connection closed by remote host" errors, but I was able to work around that by using the borgmatic wrapper and configuring retry and more frequent checkpoints.

 

[tiny6996]

have you been able to restore chunks from borg back to pbs and successfully restore files and VM from PBS? If so do you have instructions?