PBS Backup a MacBook?

What's the usecase which can't be solved by using a 3d Party backup tool like restic, Duplikate, borg or whatever you prefer?
PBS is mainly for PVE vms and lxcs, for restore you need a working PBS.

While with restic or similiar Tools you just need the backup tool Binary which xan be saved on the same storage as the actual backup ( samba or nfs share, sftp access, s3 storage etc).

For this reason although my notebook runs Debian ( thus proxmox-backip-client is available) I would never use PBS as backup for it. And I would never use restic to fo backups of my vms.
Use the right Tool for the right job.
 
Johannes S said:
What's the usecase which can't be solved by using a 3d Party backup tool like restic, Duplikate, borg or whatever you prefer?
PBS is mainly for PVE vms and lxcs, for restore you need a working PBS.

While with restic or similiar Tools you just need the backup tool Binary which xan be saved on the same storage as the actual backup ( samba or nfs share, sftp access, s3 storage etc).

For this reason although my notebook runs Debian ( thus proxmox-backip-client is available) I would never use PBS as backup for it. And I would never use restic to fo backups of my vms.
Use the right Tool for the right job.
Click to expand...
That's true, there are many useful tools for doing backups, but if i have pbs in my home network, it'd be great to achive ability to backup and restore my machine(s) within one place and functionality with VMs. Less worries less troubles))
Moreover, having an incremental backup ability, would be just great!
 
Well borg or restic Server can be installed in parallel to pbs, this is what I did on my vserver. For a gui or webui you would need to look for frontends though.

duplicati has a webui btw.

Most of these Tools just need ssh for data Transfer and all of them have incremental backup

Imho PBS is not suitable as generic backup Utility. For VM and lxc backups it's the best.

Your mileage may varie
 
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Johannes S said:
What's the usecase which can't be solved by using a 3d Party backup tool like restic, Duplikate, borg or whatever you prefer?
PBS is mainly for PVE vms and lxcs, for restore you need a working PBS.

While with restic or similiar Tools you just need the backup tool Binary which xan be saved on the same storage as the actual backup ( samba or nfs share, sftp access, s3 storage etc).

For this reason although my notebook runs Debian ( thus proxmox-backip-client is available) I would never use PBS as backup for it. And I would never use restic to fo backups of my vms.
Use the right Tool for the right job.
Click to expand...
Its easier with one backup solution, but you are correct pbs is for vms and proxmox
 
Johannes S said:
Imho PBS is not suitable as generic backup Utility. For VM and lxc backups it's the best.
Click to expand...
LXCs are backed up using a tar type backup, which is the "normal" PBS backup client with added extras and optimizations for LXCs as far as I can tell.

thus doing a tar type backup of the home directories would be a great solution... yeah, the rest of the macOS (given the lock down setup since macOS 15 and earlier) would make restoring the OS/application/libraries/support difficult, at least you can recover the main user writeable directories with a tar client.

Thus +1 for a compilation.

Which begs a question: have anybody already requested this "Feature" on buzilla?
 
hvisage said:
Which begs a question: have anybody already requested this "Feature" on buzilla?
Click to expand...
Nothing I'm aware of. A quick search on the bugzilla didn't yield anything (but maybe I used the wrong keywords?) but I encountered a bug report where somebody reported that he managed to get the backup-client working on FreeBSD by using it's Linux emulation layer. MacOS X doesn't have anything like that as far I know.

In theory it should be possible to rebuild it for MacOS X since it's written in Rust and Rust is also available for Mac OS X. Or reimplement it for MacOS to utilice mac-specific features e.G. of the MacOS filesystem which are not present in Linux.

Somebody used such an approach to reimplement the client in Go for Windows (please note the alpha status and that the last release was in 2024): https://forum.proxmox.com/threads/proxmox-backup-client-for-windows-alpha.137547/


It's already possible to use Windows Services for Linux 2 to run the backup client from an emulator though:
D

Thread 'Proxmox Backup Client Windows/macOS Build'

Hallo zusammen,

hat eigenlich jemand von euch (explizit Nerds!) schon mal versucht den PBS Client unter Windows oder macOS zu bauen?

Cygwin & co wäre erstmal absolut ok für mich.

Auf macOS könnte das sogar eher gehen.

Danke.

H.

Since docker on MacOS is also just a emulator running Linux a similiar approach might work for the backup client on MacOS too (maybe with a custom-build docker container for the backup-client). I'm not sure whether it will actually work good enough (in terms of performance and relieability) that it will be worth it though.

I'm still not convinced there is a real usecase though. As already said since the backups would need a running ProxmoxBackupServer while there are more than enough tools who just needs ssh and/or s3 access to the storage location.

Anyhow: Feel free to open a feature request on https://bugzilla.proxmox.com It won't hurt and even if it's a duplicate you might get an answer from a developer what their plans are. And other user could chime in whether they would actually need it (although I suspect that on Proxmox commercial clients there isn't propably much interest, otherwise we would already have a build for MacOS and Windows, porting is relative easy with Rust).
 
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hvisage said:
Which begs a question: have anybody already requested this "Feature" on buzilla?
Click to expand...

Hi, there no need to create that feature on Bugzilla, it is already on the Roadmap https://pbs.proxmox.com/wiki/Roadmap "Backup clients for other operating systems"

This forum-topic is used to show the interest in this feature, see:
https://forum.proxmox.com/threads/pbs-backup-a-macbook.79263/#post-403458

Aslo see:
https://forum.proxmox.com/threads/pbs-backup-a-macbook.79263/#post-403950
 
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Zappy said:
Can you elaborate why ?
Click to expand...
Because you need a running ProxmoxBackupServer to restore everything while for other backup tools it's enough to have a ssh/sftp or s3 connection to the backup storage. You also have the issue that the backup client (needed if you don't want to backup a vm or lxc) is at the moment only available as debian package while most more well-known backup tools usually have at least one (older) package in your regular distribution repos and you can always install the newest version from the project website.
In contrast for vms and lxcs PBS together with PVE have the possibility of live-restore (vm/lxc will start shortly after the begin of the restore, remaining restore will continue in paaralel ), deduplication (so if i have many similiar vms/lxcs they only need to be backuped once) and tight integration in PVEs gui (for Backup as well as a restore of whole lxcs/vms as well as single files in them) .
So imho it boils down to use the right tool for the job not a hammer for everything
 
Johannes S said:
I'm still not convinced there is a real usecase though. As already said since the backups would need a running ProxmoxBackupServer while there are more than enough tools who just needs ssh and/or s3 access to the storage location.
Click to expand...
yeah, but in a home situation where I already have a PBS that also sync off-site, I now need to setup something ssh or S3, while the PBS would've been a nice touch - Apple in anycase move away from bootable clones/bootable external storage (when the internal storage fails) so data file backups are the only option that the others are focussing on
 
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