New on LowEndTalk? Please Register and read our Community Rules.
All new Registrations are manually reviewed and approved, so a short delay after registration may occur before your account becomes active.
All new Registrations are manually reviewed and approved, so a short delay after registration may occur before your account becomes active.
Proxmox Backup Server - Yea or Nay?
raindog308
Administrator, Veteran
in General
I've been very happy with Proxmox VE as a home VM server. Was thinking of giving their backup server a spin. No subscription. This would be to backup a couple dozen VMs and VPses.
How does the community feel about this product?

Comments
I feel that it’s good.
Although, I’ve never used it—if that matters.
It's worked well for us. The incremental backups and de-duplication is a huge resource saver too.
Its a nice software - only wish it was easier to browse non encrypted file system backups then it is currently.
It works well for me too.
Yay! It's a solid piece of software.
It's great.
It is great with incremental backups
It's great. I've used it for years, never had any issues.
It's good
It is quite annoying that Proxmox VE only supports incremental and deduplicated backups for users of their Backup Server, but the PBS software is not that difficult to setup and does work reasonably well. It doesn't need many resources either, you can throw it in a LXC on an existing machine that's used for other purposes.
Proxmox Backup Server - Definitely a YEEEEE
It's good, but the PBS server needs to be local or have a very fast connection. From what I can tell, the writes are streamed to the PBS server mid-backup, so your VM will be as slow as the PBS server while it's backing up. If there was an issue with the HDD array, we often ran into problems where VMs would crawl to a halt while backing up or lose their partition tables.
Proxmox fixed this with backup fleecing, where it backs up each VM to local disk and then uploads it, but this requires some free storage space on the node itself.
If you use Proxmox VE and are satisfied with it, use Proxmox Backup as well. Seamless integration, only does what it’s supposed to do and does it to perfection.
The built in deduplication is quite nice. And it seems to be fairly polished. We do PBS and a Backblaze B2 copy for redundancy.
We did a setup for a client - ZFS SSD-Cached...
Short distance (same DC) works ok
Long distance 400+ mile, for disaster recovery - we had issues with io on the VMs during backup ...
We solved the issue with adding small intermediate server running PBS, that keep one backup in the same dc and then do pull with other PBS not carring of IO issues, were we keep more backups at disaster recovery location ... but such setup adds to the costs ...
Hmmm, these IO issues concern me as I was planning to run it on a VM that mounts NAS storage for backup space.
I use both proxmox backup server since I migrated to proxmox as well as synology active backup for business too on the vms themselves to ensure I have backups of my backups.
Pbs have served us well so far even with long distance backup.
So long distance relationships can work.
As a backup
Proxmox Backup server is the best option to backup Proxmox based VMs.