What's my best backup configuration?

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el_pedr0

Member
Sep 6, 2016
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Thanks to some great help on STH, my home server is taking shape. I'd value your tuppences on how I should configure backups for a _reasonable_ degree of protection. I'm planning on using crashplan (free edition) for the back ups.

For most of my media, the backup is essentially a clone of the source data so it doesn't matter if either the backup or the source drive fails. So I'm planning on backing up the essential data (photos and music) to an external drive.

However, the backup of my users' documents will differ from the source data because it also contains historic versions which might be useful. So I'd lose more information if the backup drive failed than if the source drive failed.

Some of the questions swirling around in my mind are:
1) Should I back up my user documents from the SSD pool to the HDD pool rather than an external drive?
Pros:
* one extra layer of protection over a single external drive because my backup (which will have historic versions of the docs) will be in a mirrored pool.
* No need to power up an external drive.

Cons:
* backup in the same physical machine as the source files

2) Should I backup the backup of my user docs? (this feels a bit OTT)

3) Should I backup the Proxmox root? If so, how?

4) How do I back up the containers/VMs?


My system:
2x 800GB s3700 SSDs in ZFS Mirror with:
* Proxmox
* Containers
* Users' documents (irreplaceable, important data, frequently changing)

2x 3TB HDDs in ZFS Mirror with:
* Photos (irreplaceable, important data, new ones get added, but are almost never edited once there)
* Music (as for photos, though replaceable as I do have the CDs but would rather stick pins in my eyes than rip them all again)
* TV Shows, Movies & other media (not so important, mostly replaceable)

I also have 2 x 1TB external hard drives and a 1x 500GB external hard drive
 
Last edited:

niekbergboer

Active Member
Jun 21, 2016
154
59
28
46
Switzerland
My Proxmox installation runs on Flash only, on three nodes, but one of the nodes runs 8 spinners as a ZPool. I share a dataset over NFS that I make my VM backups to every night. In addition, that dataset (along with many others) are incrementally replicated to a colo server nightly using ZREP ( zrep - zfs based replication and failover system ).

Edit: I use rsync from the box-with-spinners to backup all physical-server roots to ZFS datasets (which get the same ZREP treatment). I happen to have a Ceph Filesystem that I also backup and ZREP that way.