PBS on Debian

I

ITexports

Active Member
Proxmox Subscriber
Jun 29, 2021
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We're looking into hiring a VPS to have completely up to date offsite backups. Currently we're moving USB HDDs around but and we'll keep doing those to have airgapped backups but we'd like a more immediate restore option for the server rack burned down scenario.

The VPS would be provided by one of our ISPs in its dedicated datacenter with a direct line to our network. Unfortunately they're being stubborn about ISOs that are not fully vetted by their compliance dept and I'm like "dude, Proxmox is a tier 1 player" and they're like "I know, don't shoot the messenger".

So one workaround I came up with would be to have them set up the VM with Debian and us installing PBS on top of that. This part of the documentation says it's possible:
https://pbs.proxmox.com/docs/installation.html#install-proxmox-backup-server-on-debian

But it warns:
Caution

Installing Proxmox Backup on top of an existing Debian installation looks easy, but it assumes that the base system and local storage have been set up correctly. In general this is not trivial, especially when LVM or ZFS is used. The network configuration is completely up to you as well.
Click to expand...

Does anyone know what specifically is meant by "base system and local storage have been set up correctly"? What would be an incorrect setup? Is there a situation where Debian is working fine but it is incorrectly set up as far as PBS is concerned?

And what is meant by network configuration other than the usual assigning of IP address, hosts and open ports in firewall?

Thanks so much in advance!
 
ITexports said:
Does anyone know what specifically is meant by "base system and local storage have been set up correctly"? What would be an incorrect setup? Is there a situation where Debian is working fine but it is incorrectly set up as far as PBS is concerned?
Click to expand...
PBS defaults to ZFS out of the box, and a normal Debian install does not use ZFS. So there could be some work there. But this begs the question, why run PBS remotely? You don't need to do that, you just need to store the data remotely. Personally I would run PBS locally, keep a copy of the data locally and then replicate a copy of the data off site. I do something like that here at home. PBS runs in a container on my TrueNAS, and I use ZFS send to to send copies of the snapshots of the PBS data store off site.
 
ITexports said:
What would be an incorrect setup?
Click to expand...
There is no answer to this one - there are a trillion ways to setup a server incorrectly. Think about "let it run directly from a chap USB stick"-class of "wrong" doings...
ITexports said:
Is there a situation where Debian is working fine but it is incorrectly set up as far as PBS is concerned?
Click to expand...
I would call a Debian installation on a (hard- or software-) Raid6 with HDDs being fine. It does not fit PBS requirements and won't fulfill expectations...
ITexports said:
And what is meant by network configuration other than the usual assigning of IP address, hosts and open ports in firewall?
Click to expand...
Nothing. It just points out, that this is not covered by the PBS installation sequence.

:-)
 
Just recently I setup a PBS server on a Debian 13 VM. Ext4 install. Created a datastore /backups as a directory.

It's on some sort of RAID at Interserver that is SATA HDD ZFS pool backed. ~200 iops on a backup ontegrity test but also 2 vcpus maxing in the process.

Works fine for me taking 1 zfs-send dump a night and pxar backups of all VMs every 4 hours.
 
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