PBS vs. Veeam CE - especially for databases

[Hunduster]

Hello everyone,

I just joined PVE this week and come from the VMware world. I am currently migrating my Homelab to PVE to test the whole thing for possible corporate use.
I have to say: so far everything is running like clockwork!

I'm currently looking into backups and currently have the PBS and a Veeam CE instance running side by side.
I haven't noticed any major differences in performance: both are pretty much equally fast. To be honest, I can't see any advantage of Veeam at the moment.

As I currently still have some mySQL and InfluxDBs running as Docker, which are soon to be migrated to PVE, I'm wondering which backup variant is better for me.

Long story short: my question to you would be whether the PBS can back up databases so that the DB is consistent. The Qemu-Agent ist installed in all of my VMs andalso activated. A friend of mine said that the PBS has still to shut down the VM before the backup. I had read on the net that the Qemu agent would freeze the DB instance during the backup.

 

[Johannes S]

Hello,
for the databses I would create a custom backup e.G. with mysqldump/pg_dump or influx command line tool and afterwards saving the dump to a backup media with the proxmox-backup-client (for PBS) or a custom tool (like restic). Of course you could also use veeam for it if it supports the specific application.
PBS is mostly (and can't be beat for this imho) for VM and container backups. For application specific backups where consistency might be important (like databases) you should use a specific tool, made for this purpose.

Hope that helps and best regards, Johannes.

 

[f.sennj]

i can say the same, i use PBS for all VMs and CTs, but for application backup like DC and (in my case MS) SQL DB Backup i use Veeam. i guess you could license it with VUL then cost stays low also. not sure if the CE version comes with the application awareness..