Physical server full backup

J

joshiyamamoto

New Member
Aug 8, 2025
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Hey guys,

Is it possible to achieve the same result with Proxmox Backup Client as with Veeam Agent Backup ‘entire computer’ backup for a physical server? Would image backup or file backup be more appropriate here?

Best regards
 
They operate on different levels, so to answer your question: it’s not possible to perform a full disk image backup, but you can include the entire “/” filesystem, excluding the usual system directories, for a nearly equivalent result.
 
An issue I see is that to ensure consistency you would first need to do a snapshot on fileystem level e.g. a zfs or lvm snapshot. Afterwards you would mount the snapshot, create a backup from it and afterwards removing the snapshot so it doesn't waste space or hurt performance (LVM snapshots are well known to hurt performance and waste space if you keep them to long). Now I'm wondering why you would use PBS in the first place? Imho it's the best available tool for doing vm or lxc backups in ProxmoxVE, but using it for other backups doesn't make much sense:

  • You need a running PBS for restore. So different to rsync/rsnapshot/duplicati/kopia/restic/whatever open source backup tool, you use you would first need to have a working PBS to do the actual restore. Backups done with rsync or rsnapshot don't need any tool for restore (since they are just directories with the files), backups done with duplicati or restic just need the binary of the tool for restore (which is a static binary).
  • PBS at the moment doesn't support application-aware backups (e.G. for ActiveDirectory or SQL databases) so for that usecases you would need another solution (imho mysqldump or pg_dump is preffered for postgres and mariadb/mysql since Veeam doesn't support backup of Clusters. For MS SQL or ActiveDirectory Veeam Agent is propably the best tool (I lack personal experience with it though) so you can save quite on licensing costs if you do everything else with PBS or open source tools.
  • The afromentioned need of filesystem-level snapshots is needed for any of the tools (be them rsync/rsnapshot/restic/proxmox-backup-client or Veeam) so using PBS or Veeam doesn't save you the manual setup.
  • If you have use ZFS on the host to backup and on the backup target, zfs send/receive is propably the most space-efficient and most-performant optio with the same benefit of easy restore like rsync/rsnapshot
 
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