PBS with Synology NAS NFS and C2 backup?

[oviano]

Currently I am backing up 4 x. VMs using the basic backup functionality of Proxmox, ie an overnight schedule is running the backups to an NFS Synology share.

The Synology is then doing a cloud backup of everything, including the Proxmox folder to C2 storage.

What would be the benefit of using PBS to do the backups (I understand I would configure a new machine for running PBS with a data store set to an NFS share on the NAS) and then again to offsite using Synology Hyper Backup to the cloud?

Also can the PBS data store be simply copied in that manner? I read all sorts of stuff about remote PBS servers and sync jobs but can I just backup the data store to a place of my own choosing - in this case using Synology Hyper Backup to C2 - and then in the event of a catastrophic failure of everything copy back down the data store to the NAS and restore backups?

Or since Hyper Backup to C2 already does data duplication maybe I’m fine just with the simple backups?

 

[Dunuin]

Also can the PBS data store be simply copied in that manner? I read all sorts of stuff about remote PBS servers and sync jobs but can I just backup the data store to a place of my own choosing - in this case using Synology Hyper Backup to C2 - and then in the event of a catastrophic failure of everything copy back down the data store to the NAS and restore backups?

Yes. But also backup the "/etc" folder of your PBS.

And keep in mind that PBS needs IOPS performance. There is a reason why it is recommended to use local SSD as a backup storage and not HDDs or NFS/SMB shares. But for a small homelab (<1TB backups) this might still be fine if you don't care about performance.

 

[oviano]

I mostly care about reducing the size of the offsite backup, but it's not clear to me (yet) whether PBS would help in this regard.

 

[TomFIT]

Hi Oviano,
at the moment you're using the Proxmox VE Backup to a NAS with .tar.zst-Files?
Using the Proxmox Backup Server (PBS) allows you to use incremental backups on the NAS and therefore reduce the size of the backups.

But it's recommended not to setup an virtual PBS VM. You should install the PBS-Service direct on the PVE-Server:
https://pbs.proxmox.com/docs/installation.html#install-proxmox-backup-server-on-proxmox-ve

If the worst case happens and your PVE-Server with the PBS crashes, you should be able to setup a new PBS and reconnect the backup-datastore on the NAS to the new PBS to access the Backups again.

 

[oviano]

Thank you.

Yes, that's correct, I'm using Proxmox VE Backup to the NAS so it's doing a full VM image each time.

However, these are uploaded using Synology Hyper Backup to C2 which uses data de-duplication, so I'm unsure how much I would gain by switching to PBS. Yes, the copy to the NAS would obviously be quicker with incremental, but if data-duplication is applied to the full VMs when they are uploaded offsite in any case, maybe I wouldn't gain much?

 

[TomFIT]

I'm not familiar with the Synology Hyper Backup to C2 data de-duplication function. If it's able to detect all duplicates in the compressed tar files you may already have a good solution.
The PBS works on the source of the data and will reduce all data overhead / duplicate data by referencing already backuped chunks. I can't say how much thinner your backupdata will get for the sync to your external storage.

It's not much work to setup a PBS in addition to your running backup (install the service, mount a (new and empty) nas-share, add it as a pbs datastore). So you can just try it and compare the advantage of the incremental backup of the pbs with the data de-duplication of the synology hyper backup.

 

[oviano]

So can I install PBS alongside Proxmox VE as a service, on the same hardware? Or do I need to use separate hardware. I understand I shouldn't install it on a VM.

 

[TomFIT]

Yes, if you want to run the PBE on the same hardware, you can install it as a service on the PVE as documented in the link in posting #4.
But it's recommended to use a separate physical server to store backups.