PBS: How to back up physical servers?

[plh]

Yes, but you will have to code your own backup/restore script and make use of the partitioning tool of your choice and the proxmox-backup-client and all running on a Debian(-based OS) that got access to those blockdevices.
I boot a Debian from a pen drive to backup whole bare metal hosts to my PBS. As you are then backing up whole unmounted physical block devices this will work to backup any OS.

I need to backup some old Debian 9 systems from 2016 that I'm not allowed to modify. I'm going to use the combination of ReaR plus proxmox-backup-client installed in an ext3 disk image that is loopback mounted from NFS. The disk image has "pbc" installed in a NixOS user environment. Also NixOS is used for static compilation of 5 binaries needed by rear(1). I have it working, but I won't have time to create a tutorial for a couple of weeks.

Btw. static compilation of proxmox-backup-client fails in Nix. That's why I have to mount a full "nix store". Is the NixOS client officially supported?

 

[floh8]

No, thats not official supported. I think in the near future popular Linux Systems will be supported like Redhat and Ubuntu. I hope so. ;-) Windows is difficult, but will also at some time supported because of the annoying community. ;-)

 

[cheiss]

Btw. static compilation of proxmox-backup-client fails in Nix. That's why I have to mount a full "nix store". Is the NixOS client officially supported?

Yeah, it's not officially supported in any capacity. Although I personally maintain the package, that's entirely in my free time.

Static compilation fails due to musl, which then causes the `libc` Rust crate to miss some wrapper and types we use, like e.g. `renameat2`. Might be possible to work around that, but it's just a lot of work for a (pretty) niche usecase.

 

[logui]

You can boot the PVE Host with a USB pen drive loaded with Ubuntu or other linux flavor, then you can create a Disk Image of the PVE boot drive and save it as a file on a portable USB disk, the restore process will be the same, but in that create you restore from the Disk Image you previously saved, make sense?

 

[mthbrnr]

As simply as that: i use a usb drive with Redo Backup. It's not fully automated but at least i can start with a full backup.
I think that even Veeam makes a bootable drive to create backup but so far i've been pleased with Redo. There's no automatic/schedule tasks since you have to take down the physical host, but i think that's better than nothing