[PVE-User] Revisited: External disk backup using PBS - Requesting Criticism/Advice?

[Lindsay Mathieson]

On 10/04/2021 5:10 pm, Arjen via pve-user wrote:
> Don't expect to be able to backup the PBS container with 4TB to a 2TB external drive. The Datastore of a PSB does not compress much further and Proxmox VE Backup will only backup virtual disks and not mountpoints or storages passed from host, if I understand correctly.
> I suggest adding a virtual disk of 2TB to the PBS container (and format it with ext4) which can be backed up by the Proxmox VE Backup.
> I would also run the PBS container (with virtual disk) on the cluster instead on separate hardware which is a single point of failure. The local PBS would be then just as reliable as your cluster.
>
> Regarding safeness: I suggest doing a automated disaster recovery every week to make sure it works as expected. Or at least partially, like restoring the PBS from an external drive.
> Regarding practicality: I would have a remote PBS sync with your local PBS instead of moving physical disks (but you mentioned before that that was not really possible).


Did some testing over the weekend.

  * Setup a PBS Container with a 2TB root disk
  * Backed up 6 VM's to it.
  * Backed up the PBS Container to a external disk using vzdump (using
    the std proxmox gui)
      o Slooow process at 30MB/s :)
  * Deleted the PBS Container
  * Deleted the backup VM's
  * Restored the PBS container from the external hard disk
      o Much faster - averaged around 100MB/s
  * Restored PBS Container started fine and verified.
  * Restored the backed up VM's from the PBS Container
      o Worked as expected
      o All backup and running.

All in all, worked as I wanted and seems a viable option for full image 
offsite backups via external hard disks.

The process of backing up the PBS container to the external drive is 
*very* slow :( I estimate 11 hours for a full cluster backup copy. But 
since its on a independent node, it doesn't load the main cluster and 
can just happen over the weekend.



-- 
Lindsay