Recommended Backups. Stop or Suspend.

[Jarvar]

Right now I have a unit in production at a small office.
I have set it up with the GUI making vzdumps everynight shutting down the VM and making a GZIP.

What are the recommendations?
Considering the VM is a Windows 2019 Standard OS. I thought servers shouldn't be shut down so often.
Should I change it to Snapshot instead of Stop? and then maybe make a full shutdown backup less often?

I read somewhere that shutting the VM down made for a better backup, but surely people don't shut down their servers regularly or else things may break with updates....
would welcome peoples input thanks.

Thank you.

 

[Luki20]

I personally use the mode "Snapshot" for every backup, as I do not want the servers to be offline during the backup.
In the past I had to recover some VMs with a Snapshot backup and everything was fine (even Windows).

 

[Jarvar]

I personally use the mode "Snapshot" for every backup, as I do not want the servers to be offline during the backup.
In the past I had to recover some VMs with a Snapshot backup and everything was fine (even Windows).

Thank you for writing back to me about this.
It's not that these servers can't be offline, but everytime some update occurs and tthe server reboots, there is a potential for some type of change that was not present before the reboot. I haven't had any troubles yet. it's been running like this since October.
Maybe it's just a hit to my pride, the uptime of the server.

Proxmox VE has been running 51 days since, but the VM has only been operating 15 hours.
I'll try as you suggest, put it into Snapshot for a little bit and then see if I can download the images to an offsite location and restore to a different node for disaster recovery purposes.

Preference for LZO or GZIP?
I chose GZIP, maybe it will save me a little bit on compression, but not much.
Thank you.

 

[Luki20]

I'll try as you suggest, put it into Snapshot for a little bit and then see if I can download the images to an offsite location and restore to a different node for disaster recovery purposes.

Perfect - yes, it's important to try a "disaster recovery" and test the backups

Preference for LZO or GZIP?

I personally use LZO, as my backup storage is big enough and the backup should be done fast.