[PVE-User] Offsite Backups with PBS using External swapable Drives?

[Arjen]

On Thursday, April 1st, 2021 at 03:29, Lindsay Mathieson <lindsay.mathieson at gmail.com> wrote:

> On 31/03/2021 3:20 pm, Arjen via pve-user wrote:
>
> > If you run PBS somewhere, you can use a folder on the NAS as a Datastore. You could duplicate that folder to the external drive, as a backup copy of that Datastore and keep it off-site.
>
> I'll look into that, though I'd be concerned regards file locking and
>
> sync to disk issues. Worth testing out though.

Probably best to gracefully shutdown PBS before copying the disk. Or do a copy (best effort, ignoring failures) first, then shutdown PBS and rsync all remaining differences to reduce the down time on the PBS.
Maybe someone more knowledgeable of PBS can tell us how to copy a Datastore to another disk?

> > You would need a PBS to read from the external drive in case of a on-site disaster. Something like that might be simlar to what you do now, except that you need to run a PBS somewhere on-site (possibly in a VM or CT).
>
> Actually running it in a VM now for testing!

If the Datastore is on a virtual disk, you could maybe use vzdump to backup that disk or even the whole VM to an external drive?
Or first backup the whole PBS VM to the NAS and then sync to external disk, much like you do now?

kind regards, Arjen