What is the best practice for my scenario to achieve 3-2-1?

[Gamienator]

Hello everyone,

after reading a lot of documentation I ask for some advice to achieve a good Backup strategy.

For several years I had only one server in my homelab. As a backup I attached a 2 TB HDD on it with daily backups into it and uploaded that encrypted to my Google Drive. For a couple of days a second server joined this party. But adding there another HDD wasn't a simple solution for me. After using Proxmox Backup Server for my dedicated Root Server I bought a third mini server just to have it backups running on my homelab. Now how could I achieve it as best?

As far as I understand I'm not able to upload just the chunks to my cloud. One possible solution could be to add the my proxmox backup server on the cloud as a remote storage, but reading that it is a pull configuration means I have to make sure the remote PBS has to reach my internal Server everytime.

My second question is how do I backup the PBS itself? Hardware crashes or software issues can happen anywhere. Is it possible to add existing Data to an PBS? What are your Desaster Plans? Any hint would help me a lot

Thanks!

 

[Lukas Wagner]

As far as I understand I'm not able to upload just the chunks to my cloud. One possible solution could be to add the my proxmox backup server on the cloud as a remote storage, but reading that it is a pull configuration means I have to make sure the remote PBS has to reach my internal Server everytime.

A datastore is just plain files in a directory: directories named after the backup groups containing index files, which reference chunks in the .chunks directory. In theory you could just rsync them to a remote location. Native support for object storage (S3) is on our roadmap, but there is no ETA yet.

My second question is how do I backup the PBS itself? Hardware crashes or software issues can happen anywhere. Is it possible to add existing Data to an PBS? What are your Desaster Plans? Any hint would help me a lot

As mentioned above, a datastore is just plain files - so you should be able to just copy the contents of the underlying directory if you want to add existing data to a new installation of Proxmox Backup Server. Regarding the backup of the PBS instance itself, it would probably be enough to backup contents of /etc/proxmox-backup-server, as this contains all configuration related to the backup server. You can of course use proxmox-backup-client to backup these files, but keep in mind that might make recovery a bit more tricky, since you first need to restore the datastore contents before using the backup client to restore these files . So a simple, regular rsync of the configuration files might be a better solution. If you need to restore, simply reinstall PBS, adapt storage/network as desired, and then restore the PBS config.