Urbackup-client for physical PVE host itself?

[NDev]

Are there any caveats or dangers installing Urbackup-client on the physical PVE host itself, in order to backup up only its boot Disk regularly?

We are running pve 7.4 on a single node with LVM on the hosts OS disk. No clustering or anything, its a small setup with 7 VMs.
The main storage for VMs is ZFS, but that does not matter here because they are backed up with PBS anyway.

We already have a running Urbackup server VM on this host for the clients. So it would be handy to use it, and we need host backups.

 

[NDev]

In case it matters, here it says:
https://www.urbackup.org/download.html#linux_all_binary

Install with:

TF=$(mktemp) && wget "https://hndl.urbackup.org/Client/2.5.24/UrBackup Client Linux 2.5.24.sh" -O $TF && sudo sh $TF; rm -f $TF

The installer includes a glibc, libstdc++ (static) x86_64 build, and completely static Android NDK builds (bionic libc, LLVM libc++) for x86, x86_64, ARMv6+, ARM64. On x86_64 it will try to use the glibc build first and fall back to the Android NDK build if that does not work.

Does this sound hostile to PVE?

 

[jamesz]

Hi NDev, were you able to get this installed?

 

[NDev]

Hi NDev, were you able to get this installed?

I didn't try. I decided to do a 1-time full backup of the OS-disk with Clonezilla, and use a script to backup /etc daily via cronjob.

 

[guruevi]

In principle, there is nothing wrong with installing the client if you need to. The main problem with backing up VM disks is making sure they are consistent.

You can send a freeze/thaw command through the KVM commands to make sure the disk image is consistent, within your VM you can hook into the guest agent to dump databases and the like. Depending on the method of storage you use (ZFS, LVM), I think URBackup has plugins to use the snapshot feature of those to backup consistent disks.

PBS does a lot of this work 'for you' but other backup clients are often aware and can deal with KVM hosts.

As far as a single appliance portion, you should only need to backup /etc/pve (and /etc/network) to get the configuration(s), you should be able to restore by reinstalling Proxmox, restore those files and reboot. For clusters, you don't really "need to" backup hosts individually, all configurations are copied to other cluster nodes. I personally think that your 'backup' for major disasters (cluster burns down) should be in a tool like Ansible or Terraform so you can deploy them to the cloud or another set of nodes quickly.

 

[jamesz]

Thanks for the update.

 

[NDev]

In principle, there is nothing wrong with installing the client if you need to. The main problem with backing up VM disks is making sure they are consistent.

I think we are just talking about backing up the host itself (without VMs). At least thats how i meant my original topic.
The VMs can be backed up with PBS anyway.

As far as a single appliance portion, you should only need to backup /etc/pve (and /etc/network) to get the configuration(s), you should be able to restore by reinstalling Proxmox, restore those files and reboot.

I would backup /etc , and not single subdirectories in /etc.
Otherwise you miss your cronjobs and maybe other things after you restore, right?