Proxmox host backup and snapshots with timeshift. Or any other such easy tool?

[dominikp]

On my company we use Timeshift for doing snapshots of our Ubuntu/Mint workstations. Its extremely easy to use tool and rescued our workers machines few times without a problems. Just fire up any live cd with timeshift (mint), point where are backups stored, choose latest copy, restore and reboot. Thats it.
TLDR;
Has anyone tried it with proxmox host?

Full version.
I have a client where i set up the proxmox machine. I moved their services from one physical machine with Ubuntu server to few separate VMs/CTs on proxmox. And i would like to give them some easy tool to restore this server in case of some crash or something. The way Timeshift works would be perfect.

 

[Dark26]

For my part, i use rsnapshot

https://wiki.debian-fr.xyz/Rsnapshot

 

[BobhWasatch]

Is there a reason you can't just use Timeshift?

 

[dominikp]

Is there a reason you can't just use Timeshift?

Yes, lack of any information about it. Offcourse i plan to test this setup on some (non-prod)machine, but first i wanted to know about any quirks/problems i could expect or for what kind of things i should be most careful. Workstations are one thing but hypervisor is a little bit different.

 

[BobhWasatch]

I think I misunderstood your question. For some reason I thought you were talking about restoring a VM, not the whole server. Sorry about that.

The "official" way is to use the built-in vzdump backup. Disaster recovery is to re-install Proxmox and then restore the VM's from those backups. That works well but backups can take a long time and there's no incremental backup to help with that. It is also not possible to restore individual files. On the other hand it allows you to quickly rebuild a system from scratch without any extra tools.

So most people do vzdump at a relatively longer interval and use another method inside the VM's in between vzdump backups. That makes an extra step to recover from a dead host, but it allows restoring individual files and the like for the more common use-cases. Your existing Timeshift method might fit well in that role and would work pretty much the same as it does on real machines.

One issue with using a third-party backup system on the Proxmox host itself will be that the VM's are "live" and making changes to their disk images during the backup. So you might have to do some scripting to freeze/snapshot/unfreeze them in order to get a consistent backup. That is what the built-in vzdump backups do. Even then there can be issues with things like databases that do application-level caching. Solutions to that are necessarily application-specific.

Backup is a complicated topic