PBS: How to back up physical servers?

Dunuin said:
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.
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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?
 
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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. ;-)
 
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plh said:
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?
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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.
 
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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?
 
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 :)
 
Gosh... I learnt so much I'm glad the question was asked. @ floh8 i'm glad you finally got into the spirit :p

Thanks to all you sages who help us to get on the 1st rung.
 
There are very few solutions for doing a full restore to bare metal. Most enterprise class backup solutions such as Cohesity, Rubrik, Veeam, Spectrum Protect, Netbackup, etc. do not provide that function on their own. These applications typically rely upon a solution like Cristy Bare Metal Restore to help boot strap the process of restoring a physical host. These solutions rely upon a USB or network bootable image to start a server that connects to the backup solution to start restoring the disk images. This is complex, expensive, and typically not worth the hassle for a home lab. As suggested by others creating an image on a USB disk is a lot simpler and on a small scale makes much more sense.
 
Hmm. I guess I agree with what you said, but you said it in a strange way.
I'd like to make this clear.
Veeam does bare metal restore.
https://helpcenter.veeam.com/docs/agentforwindows/userguide/howto_baremetal_recovery.html?ver=60

You seem to quibble with the restore method, which involves recovery media. Ok.
Not sure how else you would accomplish this other than PXE. But, ok.

As I've decided to jump into this contentious thread, I'll make my own completely non-controversial statement.
Proxmox Backup Server support for bare metal absolutely sucks.
I see @plh got Relax and Recover (ReaR) working. I'm jealous. I could not get it to function on Debian.
@Neobin did a nice script that backs up system folders that I've considered using. He's got it on github.
I still do not have an answer for backing up the Proxmox hosts themselves, so I treat them like black boxes, make few changes, ready to rebuild if needed.
 
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tcabernoch said:
Hmm. I guess I agree with what you said, but you said it in a strange way.
I'd like to make this clear.
Veeam does bare metal restore.
https://helpcenter.veeam.com/docs/agentforwindows/userguide/howto_baremetal_recovery.html?ver=60

You seem to quibble with the restore method, which involves recovery media. Ok.
Not sure how else you would accomplish this other than PXE. But, ok.

As I've decided to jump into this contentious thread, I'll make my own completely non-controversial statement.
Proxmox Backup Server support for bare metal absolutely sucks.
I see @plh got Relax and Recover (ReaR) working. I'm jealous. I could not get it to function on Debian.
@Neobin did a nice script that backs up system folders that I've considered using. He's got it on github.
I still do not have an answer for backing up the Proxmox hosts themselves, so I treat them like black boxes, make few changes, ready to rebuild if needed.
Click to expand...
I have not monitored this thread since last year.

The solution with a loopback mounted ext3 image disk did not work as ReaR wanted to backup that "disk" also. But a colleague fixed the nix code for the proxmox-backup-client so it could compile to a static binary. We also compile a dozen of other tools statically.

Now we take backup every 4 hours of the some really old Debian PC's running all kinds of Debian testing / unstable combinations. A new ReaR workflow needed to be created (very simple as it's just Bash scripts) to embed the backup ID into the restore ISO image.

It works in the following way:
  1. The FS is backed up to a FS namespace and the snapshot/backup ID is saved.
  2. Then a ReaR restore ISO is created where the backup ID is stored in the backup/restore config file.
  3. The ISO file is then backed up to a ISO name space.
  4. In a restore situation when booting from an ISO image the corresponding FS snapshot ID will downloaded and unpacked.
Hopefully I will get some time this summer to make a tutorial on how to set this up in case others would like to learn about the solution.
 
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