Need a little hand holding on Proxmox VE backup strategies.

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vl1969

Active Member
Feb 5, 2014
634
76
28
Hello everyone.
here is my dilemma,
I have a "Single" Proxmox server setup, home use. all is current and updated.
I am using ZFS across the board. all pools are ZFS mirror

the layout is as follows:
Code:
NAME                                 STATE     READ WRITE CKSUM
    pvstore    (2x1TB HDD)               ONLINE       0     0     0
      mirror-0                           ONLINE       0     0     0
        ata-ST1000DM003-1CH162_S1DDPX2G  ONLINE       0     0     0
        ata-TOSHIBA_HDWD110_58KAV7PFS    ONLINE       0     0     0



    NAME                                                  STATE     READ WRITE CKSUM
    rpool    (2x120GB SSD)                                ONLINE       0     0     0
      mirror-0                                            ONLINE       0     0     0
        ata-INTEL_SSDSC2BW120H6_CVTR52060450120AGN-part2  ONLINE       0     0     0
        ata-SanDisk_SDSSDA120G_161443400890-part2         ONLINE       0     0     0



    NAME                                            STATE     READ WRITE CKSUM
    tank0      (3 sets of 2x2TB HDD)                ONLINE       0     0     0
      mirror-0                                      ONLINE       0     0     0
        ata-ST32000542AS_5XW2H5SP                   ONLINE       0     0     0
        ata-ST2000NM0055-1V4104_ZC21117H            ONLINE       0     0     0
      mirror-1                                      ONLINE       0     0     0
        ata-ST2000NM0055-1V4104_ZC211C1R            ONLINE       0     0     0
        ata-ST2000DL003-9VT166_5YD578A7             ONLINE       0     0     0
      mirror-2                                      ONLINE       0     0     0
        ata-ST2000DL003-9VT166_5YD3XYXZ             ONLINE       0     0     0
        ata-Hitachi_HDS722020ALA330_JK1130YAKYEX0T  ONLINE       0     0     0



    NAME                                  STATE     READ WRITE CKSUM
    tank1    (2 sets of 2x3TB HDD)        ONLINE       0     0     0
      mirror-0                            ONLINE       0     0     0
        ata-ST3000DM001-1ER166_ZA501WMX   ONLINE       0     0     0
        ata-TOSHIBA_HDWD130_X6IEDPUAS     ONLINE       0     0     0
      mirror-1                            ONLINE       0     0     0
        ata-TOSHIBA_HDWD130_Y7211HPAS     ONLINE       0     0     0
        ata-TOSHIBA_DT01ACA300_364X6TBKS  ONLINE       0     0     0



    NAME                                 STATE     READ WRITE CKSUM
    tank2    (1 sets of 2x4TB HDD)       ONLINE       0     0     0
      mirror-0                           ONLINE       0     0     0
        ata-ST4000DM004-2CV104_ZFN0TZLW  ONLINE       0     0     0
        ata-ST4000DM004-2CV104_ZFN1AADG  ONLINE       0     0     0

now, "rpool" is system nothing new here.
the "pvstore" is simply an additional storage for the system as in additional local store space. since my system drives are small I needed extra space.

"tank0" is the main user storage pool. that is where all my media and other files are.

I have folders "downloads" and "embylib" there.
all my containers are bind-mount to respective folders based on use.


"tank1" right now is a kind of online backup pool. I have an rsync job in my file server container syncing embylib to it.

"tank2" is empty as it is a brand new pool on the machine.


!!!! WHAT I WANT / NEED !!!!!

I need to understand how to backup and subsequently restore my system in order of importance.

#1 - backup my Proxmox setup properly. I know I can always reinstall the whole thing from scratch but setting all up back as it was may be challenging. how do I have at least a template of what I
have handy?

#2 - backup all my VM/LXC ? I run the backup from WebUI but than what?

#2.1 - proper way to backup all my data?
I have a 5TB external drive. it is currently NTFS formated.
what would be the best way to drop all my data on it? even if it means I have to re-format it to Linux partition.

please tell me the best tools, scripts and procedures to use.

Sincerely Vlad.
 

MiniKnight

Well-Known Member
Mar 30, 2012
3,072
973
113
NYC
I think the easiest for VMs is NFS or using pve zfs tool.

For the machine itself, that's a really good question.
 

niekbergboer

Active Member
Jun 21, 2016
154
59
28
46
Switzerland
I use http://www.bolthole.com/solaris/zrep for my off-site backups. Works fine, over SSH, and does proper ZFS snapshots and incremental transfers.

For VMs on zvols, you could in fact do a straight zrep of the zvols.

What I don't have a good solution for is full Proxmox VM backups; Proxmox insists on always making a full disk-image backup (compressed), while those backups could be a lot smaller if Proxmox could directly use ZFS snapshots (only storing blocks that changed from the last backups).

If you use Ceph RBD for your VMs, it seems that it is theoretically possible to do snapshot based backups there, too. I wish Proxmox would support that.

At any rate; my network pipe supports my daily backup load, so I use Proxmox built-in VM backups to write the backups to a ZFS dataset, and I off-site that using zrep. It's not optimal, but it works out of the box, and laziness is an oft-underappreciated trait ;)
 

vl1969

Active Member
Feb 5, 2014
634
76
28
thank you guys, I will see if any of this will work.
right now I have a big issue with my server and not sure how I can fix it yet.
but as soon as I get it back up I will need to get the data out.
 

vl1969

Active Member
Feb 5, 2014
634
76
28
very interesting reading. will surely try.

right now it looks like I will have to reinstall the whole thing anew. I can not even boot the server up.
 

kroem

Active Member
Aug 16, 2014
248
43
28
38
I do:
1) tar -> backup of /etc/pve and some other stuffz each night and just dump that on a "backup zvol"
2) pve's native backup tool to backup VM/LXC's like 2 times a week to the "backup zvol"
3) znapzend snapshots locally of all the pools. Snapshots are kept locally and sent to a local zpool for "snaps". Ranging from like every 15min for LXC's, kept for some days to one snap a day for the (above) backup zvol.
4) remote location (dad, lol) for znapzend to dump zfs snapshots. Longer retention. Keeping VM's and stuff I "really" wanna keep - photos, docs.

Nice thing about this is that I do not need to keep a bunch of open backup files from the pve tool or the tar'd /etc, I could just keep 1-2 and if I need an older backup I can just browse zfs snapshots. ( zfs snapdir=visible <3 )
 

vl1969

Active Member
Feb 5, 2014
634
76
28
if you are asking me I do not have the info..
#1 I am not sure how to calculate it. yet
#2 my whole setup is down and have been offline for the last 2 weeks. I am using this failure to do a major hardware upgrade so getting parts and swapping the whole guts.
I am moving from oldish AMD dual Opteron system with 49GB ram to the X8DT3-LN4F with dual Xeon X5670 and 120GB ram
plus SAS HBA. all is Super Micro but my CPUs could not handle the load of Emby LXC webviewer trans-coding movies on the fly. hanged the whole server.

all should be up by next week. I hope. so maybe I can tell you what I have.
total media storage is under 3TB right now. I just build the whole setup so don't have much on it except a good collections of movies and personal photos. which I want to backup off the server ASAP.
I have usb seagate 5TB drive that I want to use as first external backup set