[SOLVED] Offsite backup to external USB drive possible?

[zotac]

I have a PVE node running daily backups of all VMs and LXCs to a datastore called store1 on a PBS node on the same local network.
Now I want to add an offsite copy.
Is it possible to set up PBS so that datastore store1 gets automatically synced to an external USB hard drive to it whenever I plug it in?
I read that PBS 4 is supposed to make it easier, but I don't understand how to set it up in the first place. As far as I can understand, sync jobs is what I should do, but in order to create one, I'm supposed to create a remote first, but they're on the same box, I don't understand why I should set up a remote, perhaps I'm missing something, can you help?
Thanks.

 

[Onslow]

I think you mean the smart idea described e.g. by @Cookiefamily in the thread "Copy backups to external drive" from year 2021

C

Post in thread 'Copy backups to external drive'

May 7, 2021

Hi, the easiest way of doing that would be to create a Sync Job to a Remote (that is not actually a remote, let me explain).
You can do offsite-copies to other PBS Servers with the "Sync Job" feature for datastores. In this case we want to sync not to a different PBS server, but to our same server with a different (external) drive.

To do this, create a "Remote" in Configuration->Remotes that points to localhost. Then create a datastore on your external HDD, click on that newly created Datastore, go to "Sync Jobs", create a new sync job, choose the "Source Remote" you just created earlier...

• Cookiefamily

• 

 

[zotac]

Thank you for pointing me in the right direction!
Actually, I found that now it's easier than in 2021 because now you don't even have to create and configure a remote. You can just go to the datastore associated with your external hard drive > Sync Jobs > Add pull sync job > Location: local.
At that point, the Source Remote dropdown menu gets greyed out and you only need to pick the local source datastore you want to pull backups from. No more unnecessary authentication. And there is an option to run the sync job on mount, which is super cool.
I guess this was all introduced by PBS v4, but I had a hard time finding out about it on the official docs, I think it should be advertised better as it would benefit a lot of homelabbers.