Use pi/openmediavault as storage for backup

[Jueli]

Hello,

my name is Julia and I am new, so please forgive me if I am doing any mistakes or ask stupid questions.

I use Proxmox and I also wanted to use my WDCloud to backup my VMs. Because I need NFS, I installed openmediavault on a raspberry and included this combination as NAS in Proxmox. This worked fine, but unfortunately the storage is not shown when I want to use it for backup (I can only select internal storage).

Does anybody has a idea what went wrong or how I can check if something is wrong with the permissions I gave.

Thanks in advance
Julia

 

[Dunuin]

You need to add "backup" to the list of the content types of the storage if you want to use that storage to store vzdump backups: Datacenter -> Storage -> raspberryNFS -> Edit -> General -> Content -> make sure "Vzdump backup file" is selected.

But I really would recommend to setup a Proxmox Backup Server (PBS). Backups are done way faster (because incremental) and only need a fraction of the space (because of deduplication). For a small homelab PBS in a VM/LXC with 2 vCPUs, 2GB of RAM and a datastore on NFS would be fine. But then I would additionally create a Vzdump backup of the PBS VM/LXC and store it on the NFS share too, so in case of a reinstallation you could first restore the PBS VM/LXC from the NFS share to be able to then restore all other guests using PBS. And don't forget to also backup your "/etc" folder (specially "/etc/pve") with the backup utility of your choice.

 

[Jueli]

Dear Dunuin,

Thank you very much. To use PBS is a very good idea, but is it possible to install it on another VM or is this not recommended?

Nice weekend
Julia

 

[Dunuin]

You could run PBS bare metal on a dedicated server, which would be recommended. But you could also install it bare metal beside PVE by installing the proxmox-backup-server package. But keep in mind that you then would have to install a new PBS+PVE from scratch before you could access any backups, because you would loose your PBS together with your PVE in case of a system disk failure. Third option would be a VM where you install it from the PBS ISO.
Forth option would be a LXC. Didn't tested it yet but I guess a PBS 2.2 ontop of a "debian-11-standard" template should work as long as you create a privileged LXC. An unprivileged LXC wouldn't be able to mount any SMB/NFS shares, so using a NAS as the datastore won't work. That only works with privileged LXCs and only if you enable the NFS/CIFS feature first at "YourLXC -> Options -> Features". When using a Debian 11 LXC you also need to install the proxmox-backup-server package first like described here: https://pbs.proxmox.com/docs/installation.html#install-proxmox-backup-server-on-debian