Do you live in one of the rooms in my house? More than once I'm working on setting up something in my home lab, and either that day or the next day you drop a video on *EXACTLY* what I'm working on. This is truly the most complete, thorough, and easy to understand channel on the internet, bar none. Nice job Jim.
I have been running PBS for awhile now and was never able to get the storage located on a network drive. Your Mount and FSTAB commands were just what the doctor ordered and I was able to successful create a VM and mount the storage to my NAS. I can now get rid of the outdated Unraid container I had resorted to. Thanks for this!
This must be one of the best channels when it comes to setting up things. Well explained, any omissions corrected. Easy to follow. Very comprehensive. I love it. Thank you.
I think you may have described differential backup instead of deduplicationn. I think dedupe goes further - if you have 5 debian vms, dedupe will only store one copy of anything that's the same between the vms (eg app binaries, conf files, copy of your pub key, etc). Dedupe also causes differential backup as a byproduct.
You save me !!! i was having problems with permission denied and i did what u say with the fix and now i can see the datastore, but i dont know why the size of the datastore is less than my pool size i will see, thanks a lot
Thank you very much for the video. It helped me a lot and is exactly what I was looking for. I was not able to set up an SMB share in the proxmox backup server. The backup is relatively easy in proxmox VE, but I just couldn't manage it in PBS. With your help, I will try it out tomorrow and then set it up in the terminal. Thank you very much again.
Thankyou for this, very helpful. I just set this up for my initial demo setup. Incidentally, I had to switch the SMB mount to v2.0 as it seems neither my Unraid server nor my Synology NAS support SMB v3.0 yet.
This is awesome. I'm an XCP-NG user but thinking of switching to Proxmox because I can't back up XCP-NG VMs when I have a physical USB device connected. I never really liked Proxmox but it's growing on me. I didn't really understand the point of have a backup server when I could have just used network storage to back up directly from my PVE server. This totally changed my mind, I really get it now. Your video was easy to follow, it worked like a charm. I have it running on my test box. We'll see if I convert to Proxmox. You may have gone a long way in helping me make a decision. Thanks
I so want to do this. add antoher 8gb RAM module to my Synology nas and run PBS in a VM. All the fast storage and snapshots are already there. Why get more hardware?
PBS is really a great tool. I am using my main PBS on bare metal and started last weekend playing around with a virtualized 2nd PBS on PVE which I am planning to run remotely and which then syncs (pulls) the datastore from my main PBS to the remote site for another layer of data(store) protection 🙂 As datastore I am using a 1TB iSCSI disk which is hosted on my TrueNAS system (and of course snapshotted and replicated to a backup TrueNAS server). I have currently a Deduplication Factor of 15.13 so my datastore looks like it will "never" get full (only 24% used) even if I am backing up 24 CTs and 3 VMs with overall more than 400 Snapshots. You gotta love Proxmox and what they are doing with PVE and PBS 👍
Thanks, Jim. Your tutorials are always clear and very helpful. Have you tried doing the same thing with NFS? I’ve tried it several times, but I keep encountering permission errors!
Wow, thank you that's extremely generous. I don't use NFS as most of my end user devices are windows. I do have a TrueNAS video that sets up a NFS share, that might be useful?
Note about the "Disks" section when creating a VM: Always use SSD Emulation together with Discard to enable trim support awareness of the VM on the hypervisor level.
@@Jims-Garage I'm not sure how exactly this interoperability between the VM and the hypervisor works, but there are some blog posts spread across the internet about it. AFAIK the Promox wiki doesn't necessarily say anything about it. But what I personally found was that the GUI, especially the storage graphs "know" the correct size of the VM disk after trimming when Discard is enabled. It wouldn't work otherwise which confused me, so I always enable both lol
07:00 in fact you should always use the q35 machine type. It's much newer and more efficient. The i440fx platform didn't even have PCIe, yes, it's that old... 07:50 while that is true with physical hardware, when you use a VM you also have to enable discard to be able to free up the reclaimed space.
I use PBS as backup target for some other linux-based machines. For this I installed the PBS-Agent on these machines and can then backup them with cli commands.
Cheers Jim, great video, particularly interesting to use a virtual instance, I hadn't thought of that. Just out of interest why did you choose CIFS for the share rather than NFS?
Thanks. Why NFS, not SMB? Just a preference as I have lots of Windows machines and it plays nicer with those. There's no reason not to use NFS though, both will be fine.
I am not only improving & learning SRE stuff and good practicies but also understanding better London accent. I think your best strenght is not the way you speak. It is the speed you speak!
Here’s a catch-22, how do you backup the TrueNAS? If you lose trueNAS pool your data is gone and your backups! Think about getting an LTO4 or LTO5 tape drive and adding that to your setup and cutting your own offline backup tapes. Also, proxmox backup client is great to backup desktops in your local network. Great video!
@@Jims-Garage fair enough. Check out a video by a guy with the channel name of apalrds adventures. He does a good breakdown of why backing up to tape makes a lot of sense financially (hint it’s when you pull back data they get you with hidden costs). You have all you need to backup to tapes. You just need an inexpensive sas controller and a cheap used LTO tape drive. I got mine from goodwill (thrift store in United States) for like 45 dollars and I’ve been backing up to tape happily. 3-2-1 self hosted!
I purchased a tape drive from ebay, looking forward to using it with PBS. Got to get that additional "media" instead of just more hard disks and sdds...i think I may be going overboard? Well nothing feels better than peace of mind.
If you go into Datacenter -> Storage -> Local. You can edit the "content" of that storage and remove the option to store backups on "local" storage. Hence no longer needed to choose between storages in any drop-down menus.
Jim. Thanks for all the great videos! They have helped a lot. Regarding the cifs mount, please can you explain the addition of uid=34,gid=34 that you made to the command. Why was this necessary / what does it achieve? Thanks! EDIT- I should have watched the video fully!
They're user IDs and Groups, they're necessary for permissions. Basically who owns it and what they can do as part of a group. Without that it doesn't have permission to write/read.
@@Jims-Garage Thanks. I just came to edit my comment as I saw you addressed it later in the video. Serves me right for not watching it all through first!
What do you think about virtualizing PBS on Synology NAS? The fast storage is already there and the snapshots as well. I have a 42TB of storage on my DS1522+. I can add some more RAM as well, for the VM.
Appreciate the video and step-by-step instructions. May I ask if you have a process for backing up, at a minimum, the configuration of the Proxmox host?
Thanks, I don't back up the host per se, but I do export the /pve folder which is pretty much the same thing. I do also run the host on a raid config for redundancy.
Great video, thanks. Slightly confused me though as initially your mount was at /mnt/truenas but then when you made it permanent via fstab it got changed to /mnt/test-pbs
Jim, Great video as always. Just a question, is there's a way to use ProxMox Backup Server with a cloud storage provider to get backups off-site? To have local and cloud backups.
At 8:04 you choose 'host' as the CPU. Does selecting host give you better performance for VMs rather than any default? I have a number of VMs on Proxmox always let it chose the default in the past. Great video, half way through my build now!
Jim - You failed to mention any details about the use of UID and GID. Is this the user id ang group id of the account on your PBS system on the UID,GID of the user account that owns the SMB on the TrueNas? I think you guys that create these videos fail to realize that a lot of the community isn't as Linux savvy as you guys so explaining the most basic things is very important, especially since so many folks are moving over to Linux from Windows.
As best as I can tell, this is the user “backup” in proxmox. My TrueNas id’s start at 1000 and go up. However, in PBS backup has uid and gid as 34 for user backup. Hopefully this helps someone at some point. I located the uid and gid with the following command in pbs shell “for user in $(cat /etc/passwd | cut -f1 -d”:”); do id $user; done”. Remove the first and last “ mark from the command. Edit: after watching the video further, Jim goes over this detail explaining exactly what I found on my own.
No, sorry I don't. It's extremely simple though. Restore backup from PBS storage (select storage in tree, navigate to backups, select a backup and hit restore)
@@Jims-Garage Awesome thanks. have you done a video on restoring from backups? also i noticed you dont really run containers more so VMs is there a reason for that?
I have a little PBS installed as VM inside my PVE server. Just a bunch of VM (7/8) to backup on a rotational external USB 2.5 inch 750Gb hard drive. In a year the deduplication factor is headed to 58.46 ....!!! Crazy...!!!
@@Jims-Garage maybe one explanation is that my VM's doesn't change too much: is a classic homelab environment with services like plex, home assistant, some dockers etc... Most of the data is handled by a NAS and the VM's is related to the apps and services. I dont backup data with PBS... Still it's an astonishing deduplication factor indeed... 😀😀😀 CT 3 Groups, 81 Snapshots Host 1 Groups, 6 Snapshots VM 22 Groups, 673 Snapshots Deduplication Factor 58.46
Nice presentation. What needs to be clarified here is this. PBS does the deduplication automatically without any configuration from the user right? The storage though of the PBS isn t owned by him but its a remote one coming from TrueNas. Shouldn t you show or mention that deduplication has to be enabled on the dataset which is then mounted to the PBS? I m pretty sure there is an option at TrueNas when you create a dataset, where you enable or leave it unticked (default option if I can recall) in order for all this you want to accomplish to happen?
As usual, very detailed and helpfull content. However, one doubt arises. How does the pbs prune options and proxmox backup retention works together? Let's say in pbs I configure the datastore to keep last 5, and in proxmox I define a backup with a keep last 10 retention policy. How does that work?
Hello Jim 😊 I'm writing you from Lisboa in Portugal. Can you please do a small video explaining how can I restore my proxmox from the backup? Or even restore a VM from a backup. Beacause 90% of the times I do have problems during the restoring process and not on the backup process. I'm new to the proxmox I was using Harvester but I realized that thing was consuming memory like crazy. And I can't affort that. Thank you.
Quick question: what happens if the Proxmox Storage Server get's corrupted, or the whole host goes down. Is the backup still easily accessable if you spin up a new one? Or is it the server that holds the "encryption" key?
Brilliant video, thank you! Question, I am not clear on the following. If my physical Proxmox server dies with the backup server being virtualized as a procedure building a net new host and importing the pbs vm? Any docs on this. Thank you for your video!
I have a few VM's on a single PVE. Can I run PBS on the same PVE that my VM's are on? I will be using a synology to store the backups. What happens if the PVE machine dies with the PBS VM on it? Thanks so much for these great videos. You're a natural.
@@Jims-Garage Works perfectly! I was using the regular backup and it was eating away my synology space. I like keeping the last 10 copies, so this is saving me a ton of space. Thanks!
Wow @Jim: You are running a 2-node cluster... In itself a little dangerous. But then you add than your PBS is running in that cluster!!! If a node goes down in your cluster, it is more likely than not, than you will not be able to start the other node - because it will not start VMs until the cluster is up! Now you have the data on your TrueNAS box - but no access to the PBS that owns these data.. Lets keep our fingers crossed that you stored the encryption key safe - and not on something that relies on our cluster being operational :) I would always argue that running PBS virtualised is slightly risky, and should only be done if you are certain that is will always be operational.... In a cluster is even more dangerous, but in a 2-node cluster, that is suicidal.. (and then what happened to the 3-2-1 rule??)
Thanks for you comment, all valid points, but points that I am aware of and have prepared for. None of my VMs auto fail over, largely due to passthrough anyway. All keys are backed up and easily accessible when needed. I have extensively tested recovery for VMs and as mentioned in previous videos, I don't really care about VMs, those are quick to fix. What I care about is data, and all of that data is abstracted from the VM and can simply be imported when needed to fresh VMs. Eventually I might go triple node.
@@Jims-Garage I wasn't worried on your behalf.... It was more reflecting on the teaching/role model aspect of it.... That some (probably inexperienced) will see the video(s) and replicate, without being aware of these pitfalls :) Otherwise - like the video 😎
I’m quite interested on understanding the recovery process with a virtualized PBS instance. Actually I just have a Proxmox node with a couple of VMs. Let's say that I do the PBS vietualized way on my node and for some reason one day my node dies. Will I be able to spin up a fresh Proxmox node or a PBS fresh install rather as a VM or a barebone, configure the SMB storage and that way restore those backed up VMs? Or will they be somehow linked to the first PBS instance that died and I won't ever have access to those backed up snapshots again to be able to restore them? Thanks in advance guys!
@@blinkitogaming The backups are not linked to the PBS server - so you can always attach the storage to another PBS, and have access to the data. However - you can setup an encryption key (this is done in the "Storage" tab on the PVE server)... And if that node is lost, so is the encryption key. So either go for a trusted (or walled, where access to your data is limited to the PBS server), or make sure to store the encryption key in a safe place (actually, like with all backup - in more than one - safe place :)
I think that to activate trim you should have selected "Discard", not "SSD emulation". The latter just tells the guest system that it's running on a solid state drive even if it's not.
Great tutorial, got me up and running! But what happens if a hw fail occurs on PVE (and then also PBS)? Could you simply spin up a new PVE and restore all the backups, including the PBS?
@@Jims-Garage My NAS is a Terramaster but I removed TOS and installed Proxmox. Then I shared some folders on one of his HDs dedicated to my backups directly from Debian.
Does the deduplication work across multiple client machines? Scenario: I have a dozen client machines that are all nearly identical, but very large. Some very large files that rarely change, and when they do they change in small ways that may not be common between the clients. Some clients will also have some large static files that never change. When backing up all the clients, will whatever files that happen to be common between them be deduplicated in the overall backup storage? i.e. Not just deduplicated within each machine's history, but deduplicated across all histories of all machines in the datastore?
I have a question, I am planning to implement this in my cluster but I am having an issue with the difference between adding NFS Shared storage and this backup Server? Whats the difference?When you say it will save space does that mean this method saves space but also restores faster?
This performs incremental backups (only backs up new files each time, this saves space). Using an NFS does an entire backup of the VM each time. This also has deduplication which saves space when files are similar. In short, use it.
@@Jims-Garage By the way, just to make sure that I got it right, you put your truenas credentials in .smbcreds. IP 192.168.6.2 and "Freenas" are respectively your Truenas IP and its folder where files are going to be saved to. Right? Thanks again.
@@Jims-Garage And is it possible to backup simultanously to USB disk and normal NFS/CIFS/Local disks? As I understand PBS is doing deduplication also when it is installed on bare metal? Or do I need NFS/CIFS share for that?
G'day Jim, great videos mate. Got a question...I have an issue where PBS throws the following error when I try and add the datastore: "parameter verification errors (400) max-depth: schema does not allow additional properties". Not sure what this is all about as I have added a datastore using your method on another implementation of PBS with no issues. I googled this with no luck. Any chance you have seen something like this?
Hi! I just deployed this without thinking too much -I know, should've researched thoroughly first- and created a dataset in my TrueNAS machine without a quota. Does the chunk operation effect the entire zfs pool in which the dataset is stored? Or just the dataset itself? I'd be rather sad that I botched everything in my NAS due to trigger happy noobing. Thanks!
Hi Jim and thanks for this tutorial! With some (not all) CT I have the problem that the backup sems to be 30-50 GB. When I backup the containers on local storage they are only 500-700 MB. Seems that one file tells PBS that it is so big, although it is not.
I have to correct my comment: the local backup of my ct is 305 MB, if I backup it up to my PBS, my proxmox shows it is 559 GB big and my PBS shows it is 520 GB big (on my PBS I only used503 GB for all backups)?!? Whe I click "file-recovery" I see, that the directory "root.pxar.didx" seems to be 520 GB. I hace this issue with 4 of my 5 CT and till now now solution, so I only use local storage for backup.
I hav set up a new PBS as VM and used my truans-share, too, but the result is the same (see above). Seems that backing up lxc to pbs is not the best choice...
@Jims-Garage I got it sorted out. Turns out my lvm was full and wouldn't let the VM start. I found a video on how to move the VMs to another "storage pool" and that got me going. Since initial setup I'd upgraded the pve ssd and was able to expand the local, but can't figure out how to get the lvm to expand, maybe I can't since local took all the allocation?! All that aside, could you do a video sometime on how to do those options, since pbs couldn't start I didn't have a way to restore a backup and have no idea how to re/install and import the existing backups to the new install.
@Jims-Garage totally agree Jim. I use CIFS between my windows pc and my synology NAS too. But between the proxmox (Debian) and the synology (Linux based) I somehow thought NFS would bring advantages.
I'm going to need to watch this later, because my 2 node proxmox has so many problems with backup (there's errors that I have been ignoring for a while) . I'm doing a daily backup of the VMs etc.. and I keep 7 days, one node seems to be working fine the other always has errors.
Since TrueNas (at least scale) supports deduplication itself, what is the point of doing all these extra steps (of creating a middle step with proxmox backup server) instead of just adding as backup storage TrueNas itself and choosing the storage options accordingly. Also at 6:47 you should check discard as well in order for trim to work properly.
Ok, i just followed this to a "T",everything worked fine while setting it up, as soon as i finished i tried to do a "run now" in the backups tab of proxmox and it errored, now pbs is showing [bad request (400) unable to open chunk store 'Backups' at "/mnt/truenas.chunks" - no such file or directory (os error 2)]. What happened? I figured it out, in the fstab i put "/mnt/Backups" (dataset name) instead of "/mnt/truenas" (directiry name). Fixed that then rebooted to check and its working now. How do you have darkmode on pbs window? Is that from your os/browser, or is that a theme in PBS like i have on my PVE?
So, your explanation of deduplication is incorrect. Your definition is simply an “Incremental” backup - i.e. backing up just the files that have changed. Deduplication is actually not backing up all files that are the same across multiple sources - i.e. if you’re backing up multiple VMs of the same OS, it would only back up a single copy of the files that are identical across all VMs.
Yes, you're correct, and this approach scales further when you're looking at SANs, Cloud etc (amazing what Google does in this space). I didn't want to go too far down the rabbit hole of definitions but appreciate there is a distinct nuance.
unfortunately it seems you cannot backup to PBS the VM which actually hosts the datastore. I have set up my datastore based on the video (but used NFS instead of Samba) and everything works fine except backing up my NAS VM which is actually hosting the datastore. I guess its because PVE stops the VM for a second and the share disappears. Interestingly the same backup structure works when using a simple network share (without PBS) as a target
@@Jims-Garage yes, backing up the NAS OS (OpenMediaVault) disk to the drives attached to the NAS. this may sound stupid at first glance, but the main reason i am using OMV is that i can individually read each drive from any operating system and i can attach pre-filled drives to it. was thinking several times about switching to TrueNAS and ZFS RAID, but that would always require a machine able to host 4+ HDDs to read the data. I can read all data from my NAS even from a windows laptop.
@@Jims-Garage yeah, don't worry. generally i use snapraid, but have regular offsite and B2 cloud backups for important data (which are actually the VM snapshots). actually i think its pretty overkill for a bunch of movies i am never gonna watch
I would want to do a test restore, assuming the Proxmox Backup Server VM is unavailable (eg: destroyed in the same hw failure). It seems reasonable to expect a new PBS using the same NAS backend would just work for the restore, but I don't know that. That's assuming a PBS is actually needed for a restore. Proxmox might have a handy recovery utility. BTW, incremental backups and deduplication are different concepts, but they compliment each other so well that making a distinction perhaps only belongs in pedantic comments.
Thanks. I appreciate it isn't, I've covered the nuance in previous videos and didn't want to go down the same rabbit hole again. However, PBS does use deduplication when performing incremental backups.
so you need a keyframe and then all the differentials and hope there's no issues with any of them. This strategy is old and problematic and has it's own risks. Good luck.
Do you live in one of the rooms in my house?
More than once I'm working on setting up something in my home lab, and either that day or the next day you drop a video on *EXACTLY* what I'm working on.
This is truly the most complete, thorough, and easy to understand channel on the internet, bar none.
Nice job Jim.
Haha, spooky! Thanks for the feedback, I really appreciate it.
Make sure to feed him once in a while.
Check the cupboards. He looks flexible, maybe in there??
I have been running PBS for awhile now and was never able to get the storage located on a network drive. Your Mount and FSTAB commands were just what the doctor ordered and I was able to successful create a VM and mount the storage to my NAS. I can now get rid of the outdated Unraid container I had resorted to. Thanks for this!
Great, that's good to hear.
This must be one of the best channels when it comes to setting up things. Well explained, any omissions corrected. Easy to follow. Very comprehensive. I love it. Thank you.
Appreciate that, thank you!
I agree
Thanks for this! Could never figure out how to get this to work with my truenas shares...until I saw this video!! Exellent! Thank you!
You're welcome, glad it helped
I think you may have described differential backup instead of deduplicationn. I think dedupe goes further - if you have 5 debian vms, dedupe will only store one copy of anything that's the same between the vms (eg app binaries, conf files, copy of your pub key, etc). Dedupe also causes differential backup as a byproduct.
You save me !!! i was having problems with permission denied and i did what u say with the fix and now i can see the datastore, but i dont know why the size of the datastore is less than my pool size i will see, thanks a lot
Thank you very much for the video. It helped me a lot and is exactly what I was looking for. I was not able to set up an SMB share in the proxmox backup server. The backup is relatively easy in proxmox VE, but I just couldn't manage it in PBS. With your help, I will try it out tomorrow and then set it up in the terminal. Thank you very much again.
You're welcome! Let me know if it works
Very well done, thanks. Easy to follow, no fluff, calm, well thought out.
Much appreciated!
Great video! I implemented the NFS share, I’m getting fast speeds 1-4gbs with truenas virtualized too.
That's impressive performance, nice one!
Thankyou for this, very helpful. I just set this up for my initial demo setup. Incidentally, I had to switch the SMB mount to v2.0 as it seems neither my Unraid server nor my Synology NAS support SMB v3.0 yet.
Interesting, are you able to update the Synology? SMBv2 suffers from Wannacry Zero Day, not sure exposed you are on a non-Windows machine.
HA! Brilliant! At last someone explaining the benefits of the PBS and the step-by-step configuration. Thank you, Jim!
Thanks 👍
The funny part here is that despite the fact that Jim explains this perfectly, i still managed to F it up, lol amazing. Thanks Jim
@@sking379 haha no doubt I was in the same position once!
@@Jims-Garage thanks buddy
This is awesome. I'm an XCP-NG user but thinking of switching to Proxmox because I can't back up XCP-NG VMs when I have a physical USB device connected. I never really liked Proxmox but it's growing on me. I didn't really understand the point of have a backup server when I could have just used network storage to back up directly from my PVE server. This totally changed my mind, I really get it now. Your video was easy to follow, it worked like a charm. I have it running on my test box. We'll see if I convert to Proxmox. You may have gone a long way in helping me make a decision. Thanks
Thanks, really appreciate the feedback
Verry good Jim! Yet again an easy to follow guide.. This is verry useful
Thanks, glad you found it useful.
@@Jims-Garage why samba over NFS for backend ?
@@brianhansen9578 I prefer the security and role based access controls (NFS isn't as feature rich in this area).
Nice one! Worked on the first go. Will re-use the smb share/ credentials method for my plex vm server. Thanks!
Great, thanks.
Your videos are absolute amazing... Detailed and accurate and helpful!!!
Many thanks, appreciate the feedback 🙂
Took me a while to get it working, but I had to just create a new user on my synology for it to work! Thanks for the video
Great, good job 👍
I so want to do this. add antoher 8gb RAM module to my Synology nas and run PBS in a VM. All the fast storage and snapshots are already there. Why get more hardware?
Perfect timing as alway 😂 I will definitely look to set this up asap when I have my network figured out 😅
Psychic Jim strikes again 😂
@@Jims-Garage with scary accuracy
PBS is really a great tool. I am using my main PBS on bare metal and started last weekend playing around with a virtualized 2nd PBS on PVE which I am planning to run remotely and which then syncs (pulls) the datastore from my main PBS to the remote site for another layer of data(store) protection 🙂
As datastore I am using a 1TB iSCSI disk which is hosted on my TrueNAS system (and of course snapshotted and replicated to a backup TrueNAS server). I have currently a Deduplication Factor of 15.13 so my datastore looks like it will "never" get full (only 24% used) even if I am backing up 24 CTs and 3 VMs with overall more than 400 Snapshots.
You gotta love Proxmox and what they are doing with PVE and PBS 👍
That's awesome, cool setup!
Was pondering on the PBS for a while. Your breakdown here has cleaed/answered, any questions and doubts about giving it a spin.
Thanks for sharing.
You're welcome 😁
Thanks, Jim. Your tutorials are always clear and very helpful. Have you tried doing the same thing with NFS? I’ve tried it several times, but I keep encountering permission errors!
Wow, thank you that's extremely generous. I don't use NFS as most of my end user devices are windows. I do have a TrueNAS video that sets up a NFS share, that might be useful?
Note about the "Disks" section when creating a VM: Always use SSD Emulation together with Discard to enable trim support awareness of the VM on the hypervisor level.
Thanks, useful tip 💯
@@Jims-Garage I'm not sure how exactly this interoperability between the VM and the hypervisor works, but there are some blog posts spread across the internet about it. AFAIK the Promox wiki doesn't necessarily say anything about it. But what I personally found was that the GUI, especially the storage graphs "know" the correct size of the VM disk after trimming when Discard is enabled. It wouldn't work otherwise which confused me, so I always enable both lol
@@cheebadigga4092 thanks, I'll check mine out this evening with it enabled.
07:00 in fact you should always use the q35 machine type. It's much newer and more efficient. The i440fx platform didn't even have PCIe, yes, it's that old...
07:50 while that is true with physical hardware, when you use a VM you also have to enable discard to be able to free up the reclaimed space.
Thanks for the added details
Thanks for the demo and info, have a great day
Thanks, you too!
Great job Sir, love your content! Excellent tutorial!
Much appreciated!
That's a very good video. Thanks!
You are welcome!
Great video, thank you. I'm from Hong Kong, and English is not my native language, but I can hear quite clearly.
Thanks, I appreciate your feedback 😃
I use PBS as backup target for some other linux-based machines. For this I installed the PBS-Agent on these machines and can then backup them with cli commands.
Excellent presentation. Thank you.
Glad it was helpful!
Cheers Jim, great video, particularly interesting to use a virtual instance, I hadn't thought of that. Just out of interest why did you choose CIFS for the share rather than NFS?
Thanks! Cifs is more advanced when it comes to role based access control and permissions (and a few other benefits).
I like this vid. Good insight and yes I can now see the advantages of PBS.
Thanks, it's a really powerful tool.
Finally some proper PBS video. Thank You
Edit: Why SMB not NFS?
Thanks. Why NFS, not SMB? Just a preference as I have lots of Windows machines and it plays nicer with those. There's no reason not to use NFS though, both will be fine.
@@Jims-Garage I was just looking for some tech reason. Personal preferences also works. I just started playing with PSB and love it.
That’s a helpful video man!
Glad it was helpful!
I am not only improving & learning SRE stuff and good practicies but also understanding better London accent.
I think your best strenght is not the way you speak. It is the speed you speak!
Thanks, I appreciate the feedback. I'm not from London though 😉 Midlands
Here’s a catch-22, how do you backup the TrueNAS? If you lose trueNAS pool your data is gone and your backups! Think about getting an LTO4 or LTO5 tape drive and adding that to your setup and cutting your own offline backup tapes. Also, proxmox backup client is great to backup desktops in your local network. Great video!
I backup to Google Drive, checkout my rClone video. Your point is valid though, how many is enough when it comes to backups?
@@Jims-Garage fair enough. Check out a video by a guy with the channel name of apalrds adventures. He does a good breakdown of why backing up to tape makes a lot of sense financially (hint it’s when you pull back data they get you with hidden costs). You have all you need to backup to tapes. You just need an inexpensive sas controller and a cheap used LTO tape drive. I got mine from goodwill (thrift store in United States) for like 45 dollars and I’ve been backing up to tape happily. 3-2-1 self hosted!
I purchased a tape drive from ebay, looking forward to using it with PBS. Got to get that additional "media" instead of just more hard disks and sdds...i think I may be going overboard? Well nothing feels better than peace of mind.
Excellent video, well done. Hope you're doing ok over there.
@@qohena6195 thanks for the comment, I'm well, hope you are as well.
Great video 👍 especially without background noise 🤔🤨😳😲😉
If you go into Datacenter -> Storage -> Local. You can edit the "content" of that storage and remove the option to store backups on "local" storage. Hence no longer needed to choose between storages in any drop-down menus.
I came for the backup tutorial but stayed for the magenta cardigan!
There's a whole ensemble to work through, Jim's Cardigans coming soon!
Jim. Thanks for all the great videos! They have helped a lot. Regarding the cifs mount, please can you explain the addition of uid=34,gid=34 that you made to the command. Why was this necessary / what does it achieve? Thanks! EDIT- I should have watched the video fully!
They're user IDs and Groups, they're necessary for permissions. Basically who owns it and what they can do as part of a group. Without that it doesn't have permission to write/read.
@@Jims-Garage Thanks. I just came to edit my comment as I saw you addressed it later in the video. Serves me right for not watching it all through first!
Thanks Jim 👍
You're welcome
What do you think about virtualizing PBS on Synology NAS? The fast storage is already there and the snapshots as well. I have a 42TB of storage on my DS1522+. I can add some more RAM as well, for the VM.
That should be fine
Thanks again!
You're welcome
Appreciate the video and step-by-step instructions. May I ask if you have a process for backing up, at a minimum, the configuration of the Proxmox host?
Thanks, I don't back up the host per se, but I do export the /pve folder which is pretty much the same thing. I do also run the host on a raid config for redundancy.
Great video, thanks. Slightly confused me though as initially your mount was at /mnt/truenas but then when you made it permanent via fstab it got changed to /mnt/test-pbs
im confused too, so, u write it using /mnt/truenas or /mnt/test-pbs?
Jim, Great video as always. Just a question, is there's a way to use ProxMox Backup Server with a cloud storage provider to get backups off-site? To have local and cloud backups.
Thanks, I will need to check. The way I do it is to backup my Nas to the cloud using rClone (I have a video on that).
At 8:04 you choose 'host' as the CPU. Does selecting host give you better performance for VMs rather than any default? I have a number of VMs on Proxmox always let it chose the default in the past. Great video, half way through my build now!
Host gives it the full capabilities of the CPU, therefore best performance.
@@Jims-Garage many thanks for that. I’ll flip them all to host now. I did my Windows 10 VM last night and noticed a definite performance improvement.
Earned a sub, thanks.
@@dougbeard7624 much appreciated 👍
Jim - You failed to mention any details about the use of UID and GID. Is this the user id ang group id of the account on your PBS system on the UID,GID of the user account that owns the SMB on the TrueNas? I think you guys that create these videos fail to realize that a lot of the community isn't as Linux savvy as you guys so explaining the most basic things is very important, especially since so many folks are moving over to Linux from Windows.
As best as I can tell, this is the user “backup” in proxmox. My TrueNas id’s start at 1000 and go up. However, in PBS backup has uid and gid as 34 for user backup. Hopefully this helps someone at some point. I located the uid and gid with the following command in pbs shell “for user in $(cat /etc/passwd | cut -f1 -d”:”); do id $user; done”. Remove the first and last “ mark from the command.
Edit: after watching the video further, Jim goes over this detail explaining exactly what I found on my own.
great video, thank you! if pbs is a vm in the proxmox cluster, would you recommend backing that up to itself as well?
You can, but it's probably not needed as it's quick to rebuild
@@Jims-Garage thanks. Have used the video to backup to unraid server. Works well. Looking forward to the de-dupe! Subscribed!
@@bigup7777 that's great, thanks 👍
Thanks for the video. How do you go about to backup your Proxmox installation?
I don't, but I do run it on a raid mirror, and I have 2 nodes. You can backup by cloning the pve folder is my understanding
Excellent video, do you have a similar video for restoring a backup?
No, sorry I don't. It's extremely simple though. Restore backup from PBS storage (select storage in tree, navigate to backups, select a backup and hit restore)
Love the way you explain. One question. Is it still ok if my NAS is also on the same host?
Yes, that's fine.
@@Jims-Garage Awesome thanks. have you done a video on restoring from backups? also i noticed you dont really run containers more so VMs is there a reason for that?
I have a little PBS installed as VM inside my PVE server.
Just a bunch of VM (7/8) to backup on a rotational external USB 2.5 inch 750Gb hard drive.
In a year the deduplication factor is headed to 58.46 ....!!!
Crazy...!!!
Wow, that's amazing! Think that's the best I've seen!
@@Jims-Garage maybe one explanation is that my VM's doesn't change too much: is a classic homelab environment with services like plex, home assistant, some dockers etc...
Most of the data is handled by a NAS and the VM's is related to the apps and services.
I dont backup data with PBS...
Still it's an astonishing deduplication factor indeed... 😀😀😀
CT 3 Groups, 81 Snapshots
Host 1 Groups, 6 Snapshots
VM 22 Groups, 673 Snapshots
Deduplication Factor 58.46
Great video sir well explained +1 sub
Thanks for the kind feedback and support
Nice presentation. What needs to be clarified here is this. PBS does the deduplication automatically without any configuration from the user right? The storage though of the PBS isn t owned by him but its a remote one coming from TrueNas. Shouldn t you show or mention that deduplication has to be enabled on the dataset which is then mounted to the PBS? I m pretty sure there is an option at TrueNas when you create a dataset, where you enable or leave it unticked (default option if I can recall) in order for all this you want to accomplish to happen?
The other benefit of PBS is that you can restore a individual file if required.
As usual, very detailed and helpfull content. However, one doubt arises. How does the pbs prune options and proxmox backup retention works together? Let's say in pbs I configure the datastore to keep last 5, and in proxmox I define a backup with a keep last 10 retention policy. How does that work?
Hello Jim 😊
I'm writing you from Lisboa in Portugal.
Can you please do a small video explaining how can I restore my proxmox from the backup?
Or even restore a VM from a backup.
Beacause 90% of the times I do have problems during the restoring process and not on the backup process.
I'm new to the proxmox I was using Harvester but I realized that thing was consuming memory like crazy. And I can't affort that.
Thank you.
Yes, I'll come back to this in the future. Wow, you're brave running Harvester at home! I do love the idea of Kubernetes inside Kubernetes 😂
Quick question: what happens if the Proxmox Storage Server get's corrupted, or the whole host goes down. Is the backup still easily accessable if you spin up a new one? Or is it the server that holds the "encryption" key?
You can create a new PBS and add the same credentials, that's fine.
@@Jims-Garage Perfect, thanks!
would pbs run also in a lxc container? or do we indeed need a vm for that? - thank you for your answer
It shoulf work in an LXC, albeit a VM might be a better choice.
Brilliant video, thank you! Question, I am not clear on the following. If my physical Proxmox server dies with the backup server being virtualized as a procedure building a net new host and importing the pbs vm? Any docs on this. Thank you for your video!
Rebuild Proxmox, recreate PBS VM, attach the existing NAS with all your backups. Voila!
I have a few VM's on a single PVE. Can I run PBS on the same PVE that my VM's are on? I will be using a synology to store the backups. What happens if the PVE machine dies with the PBS VM on it? Thanks so much for these great videos. You're a natural.
That's exactly what I'm doing in this video, and I give the reasons for this (which seems a similar setup to yours).
@@Jims-Garage Thanks! I will give a go tonight?
@@Jims-Garage Works perfectly! I was using the regular backup and it was eating away my synology space. I like keeping the last 10 copies, so this is saving me a ton of space. Thanks!
@@BillCClinton you're welcome, glad it worked out well
Samba vs. NFS was compared before choosing Samba ?
Not in terms of performance, I just prefer SAMBA because I use a lot of Windows devices. It doesn't really matter AFAIK.
Wow @Jim: You are running a 2-node cluster... In itself a little dangerous.
But then you add than your PBS is running in that cluster!!! If a node goes down in your cluster, it is more likely than not, than you will not be able to start the other node - because it will not start VMs until the cluster is up!
Now you have the data on your TrueNAS box - but no access to the PBS that owns these data.. Lets keep our fingers crossed that you stored the encryption key safe - and not on something that relies on our cluster being operational :)
I would always argue that running PBS virtualised is slightly risky, and should only be done if you are certain that is will always be operational.... In a cluster is even more dangerous, but in a 2-node cluster, that is suicidal.. (and then what happened to the 3-2-1 rule??)
Thanks for you comment, all valid points, but points that I am aware of and have prepared for. None of my VMs auto fail over, largely due to passthrough anyway. All keys are backed up and easily accessible when needed. I have extensively tested recovery for VMs and as mentioned in previous videos, I don't really care about VMs, those are quick to fix. What I care about is data, and all of that data is abstracted from the VM and can simply be imported when needed to fresh VMs.
Eventually I might go triple node.
@@Jims-Garage I wasn't worried on your behalf.... It was more reflecting on the teaching/role model aspect of it.... That some (probably inexperienced) will see the video(s) and replicate, without being aware of these pitfalls :)
Otherwise - like the video 😎
I’m quite interested on understanding the recovery process with a virtualized PBS instance.
Actually I just have a Proxmox node with a couple of VMs. Let's say that I do the PBS vietualized way on my node and for some reason one day my node dies.
Will I be able to spin up a fresh Proxmox node or a PBS fresh install rather as a VM or a barebone, configure the SMB storage and that way restore those backed up VMs?
Or will they be somehow linked to the first PBS instance that died and I won't ever have access to those backed up snapshots again to be able to restore them?
Thanks in advance guys!
@@blinkitogaming The backups are not linked to the PBS server - so you can always attach the storage to another PBS, and have access to the data.
However - you can setup an encryption key (this is done in the "Storage" tab on the PVE server)... And if that node is lost, so is the encryption key. So either go for a trusted (or walled, where access to your data is limited to the PBS server), or make sure to store the encryption key in a safe place (actually, like with all backup - in more than one - safe place :)
@@tonypilborg thank you for your response, I appreciate it!
I think that to activate trim you should have selected "Discard", not "SSD emulation". The latter just tells the guest system that it's running on a solid state drive even if it's not.
Great tutorial, got me up and running! But what happens if a hw fail occurs on PVE (and then also PBS)? Could you simply spin up a new PVE and restore all the backups, including the PBS?
Yes, you can restore a new PVE from an existing PBS. However, if PBS failed, you'd need to rebuild PBS first, and specify your existing NAS store.
@@Jims-Garage Do you know if there is a tutorial for this?
@@p1ngvin1 you've just done everything that's required. You need to mount the folder to PBS from the Nas, then add the data store in pve
Hi Jim, how do you limit the size of the pbs datastore? I feel like it's going to fill up all the disk space on my NAS with chunks...
Create a bespoke dataset and put the limit on that.
@@Jims-Garage: Sorry Jim... I'm a beginner... Could you explain to me what a "bespoke dataset" is and where it can be done? Thank you very much!
@@fver00 what's your NAS? Datasets are part of zfs and TrueNAS
@@Jims-Garage My NAS is a Terramaster but I removed TOS and installed Proxmox. Then I shared some folders on one of his HDs dedicated to my backups directly from Debian.
Does the deduplication work across multiple client machines? Scenario: I have a dozen client machines that are all nearly identical, but very large. Some very large files that rarely change, and when they do they change in small ways that may not be common between the clients. Some clients will also have some large static files that never change. When backing up all the clients, will whatever files that happen to be common between them be deduplicated in the overall backup storage? i.e. Not just deduplicated within each machine's history, but deduplicated across all histories of all machines in the datastore?
I have a question, I am planning to implement this in my cluster but I am having an issue with the difference between adding NFS Shared storage and this backup Server? Whats the difference?When you say it will save space does that mean this method saves space but also restores faster?
This performs incremental backups (only backs up new files each time, this saves space). Using an NFS does an entire backup of the VM each time. This also has deduplication which saves space when files are similar. In short, use it.
Will do! Also I have about a 4 PC cluster, when setting up this backup should I setup HA?
@@fousay you could do yes. I assume you're saving to a separate NAS?
Can I install PBS on my PVE and use PBS to backup to an external usb disk instead of TRUENAS? Thanks for your video. Very neat!
Yes, that should be possible. Just change the data store location
@@Jims-Garage By the way, just to make sure that I got it right, you put your truenas credentials in .smbcreds. IP 192.168.6.2 and "Freenas" are respectively your Truenas IP and its folder where files are going to be saved to. Right? Thanks again.
@@Jims-Garage And is it possible to backup simultanously to USB disk and normal NFS/CIFS/Local disks?
As I understand PBS is doing deduplication also when it is installed on bare metal? Or do I need NFS/CIFS share for that?
G'day Jim, great videos mate.
Got a question...I have an issue where PBS throws the following error when I try and add the datastore: "parameter verification errors (400) max-depth: schema does not allow additional properties". Not sure what this is all about as I have added a datastore using your method on another implementation of PBS with no issues. I googled this with no luck. Any chance you have seen something like this?
Sorry I haven't seen that error before. I think it's literally what it says though, one of the parameters is incorrect.
Hi! I just deployed this without thinking too much -I know, should've researched thoroughly first- and created a dataset in my TrueNAS machine without a quota. Does the chunk operation effect the entire zfs pool in which the dataset is stored? Or just the dataset itself? I'd be rather sad that I botched everything in my NAS due to trigger happy noobing. Thanks!
i have the same question. let me know if you already have the answer please. Thanks
Great video. Is it possible to add Corosync in pbm? So I can use a pbm on bare-metal as my third cluster node achieving quorum? Thanks!
Thanks. Yes, it's just Debian 12 under the hood, should be able to install the binary without issue.
Cool, perhaps I'll try that. Is there a reason why you choose VM and not LXC for installing pbs in this video? LXC seem lighter to me. @@Jims-Garage
@@magnerugnes you're right, it is lighter. However, I prefer the portability, security, and ease of backup with a VM.
Thank you
You're welcome 🤗
I appreciated the prune joke
Hi Jim and thanks for this tutorial! With some (not all) CT I have the problem that the backup sems to be 30-50 GB. When I backup the containers on local storage they are only 500-700 MB. Seems that one file tells PBS that it is so big, although it is not.
I have to correct my comment: the local backup of my ct is 305 MB, if I backup it up to my PBS, my proxmox shows it is 559 GB big and my PBS shows it is 520 GB big (on my PBS I only used503 GB for all backups)?!? Whe I click "file-recovery" I see, that the directory "root.pxar.didx" seems to be 520 GB. I hace this issue with 4 of my 5 CT and till now now solution, so I only use local storage for backup.
Interesting, I will have to look into that.
I hav set up a new PBS as VM and used my truans-share, too, but the result is the same (see above). Seems that backing up lxc to pbs is not the best choice...
When I run "zfs get all 'DATASTORE/subvol-MY_LXC_ID-disk-0" on my proxmox, I get "used: 1.37G, available: 6.63G, compressratio: 2.21x" > seems all ok.
Ok, my PBS seems to have broke. How do I go about reinstalling and importing the current backups to the new install?
You should restore PBS from backup, failing that reinstall it and import the same encryption keys as before
@Jims-Garage I got it sorted out. Turns out my lvm was full and wouldn't let the VM start. I found a video on how to move the VMs to another "storage pool" and that got me going. Since initial setup I'd upgraded the pve ssd and was able to expand the local, but can't figure out how to get the lvm to expand, maybe I can't since local took all the allocation?!
All that aside, could you do a video sometime on how to do those options, since pbs couldn't start I didn't have a way to restore a backup and have no idea how to re/install and import the existing backups to the new install.
Is there any specific advantage of using CIFS over NFS?
@@JoelFabiani for me it's because I operate windows and Linux estate with my main machine being windows (SMB plays nicer)
@Jims-Garage totally agree Jim. I use CIFS between my windows pc and my synology NAS too. But between the proxmox (Debian) and the synology (Linux based) I somehow thought NFS would bring advantages.
I'm going to need to watch this later, because my 2 node proxmox has so many problems with backup (there's errors that I have been ignoring for a while) . I'm doing a daily backup of the VMs etc.. and I keep 7 days, one node seems to be working fine the other always has errors.
Interesting, share some logs and I can help to diagnose
Can you write how we should create scheduler for backup VM ? Use mode stop or snapshot ?
Since TrueNas (at least scale) supports deduplication itself, what is the point of doing all these extra steps (of creating a middle step with proxmox backup server) instead of just adding as backup storage TrueNas itself and choosing the storage options accordingly.
Also at 6:47 you should check discard as well in order for trim to work properly.
Good question. From my understanding and experience, deduplication of differential backups is smaller than deduplication of full backups.
@@Jims-Garage So the key word in Prox Back Server is differential while TrueNas only does it on full backups?
@@ierosgr proxmox ve does full backups, proxmox backup server does differential (and deduplication)
Ok, i just followed this to a "T",everything worked fine while setting it up, as soon as i finished i tried to do a "run now" in the backups tab of proxmox and it errored, now pbs is showing [bad request (400) unable to open chunk store 'Backups' at "/mnt/truenas.chunks" - no such file or directory (os error 2)].
What happened?
I figured it out, in the fstab i put "/mnt/Backups" (dataset name) instead of "/mnt/truenas" (directiry name). Fixed that then rebooted to check and its working now.
How do you have darkmode on pbs window? Is that from your os/browser, or is that a theme in PBS like i have on my PVE?
so the correct one was /mnt/truenas (the mount point)?
@@genshinimpactjoki5393 in my case, yes.
Everything seems to be working ran a backup but don’t see anything in my share
@@Neo198431 it should all be in the chunks folder, you cannot access it as a single file
So, your explanation of deduplication is incorrect. Your definition is simply an “Incremental” backup - i.e. backing up just the files that have changed. Deduplication is actually not backing up all files that are the same across multiple sources - i.e. if you’re backing up multiple VMs of the same OS, it would only back up a single copy of the files that are identical across all VMs.
Yes, you're correct, and this approach scales further when you're looking at SANs, Cloud etc (amazing what Google does in this space). I didn't want to go too far down the rabbit hole of definitions but appreciate there is a distinct nuance.
can you make a video on the proxmox mail gate? Kinda curious what that does.
Not something that I have used as I don't want to host my own email server. It does sound useful though.
Not something that I have used as I don't want to host my own email server. It does sound useful though.
unfortunately it seems you cannot backup to PBS the VM which actually hosts the datastore. I have set up my datastore based on the video (but used NFS instead of Samba) and everything works fine except backing up my NAS VM which is actually hosting the datastore. I guess its because PVE stops the VM for a second and the share disappears. Interestingly the same backup structure works when using a simple network share (without PBS) as a target
Yes, I suspect that's right. However, are you backing up a NAS to a NAS? My NAS is my backup with a mirror in the cloud.
@@Jims-Garage yes, backing up the NAS OS (OpenMediaVault) disk to the drives attached to the NAS.
this may sound stupid at first glance, but the main reason i am using OMV is that i can individually read each drive from any operating system and i can attach pre-filled drives to it. was thinking several times about switching to TrueNAS and ZFS RAID, but that would always require a machine able to host 4+ HDDs to read the data. I can read all data from my NAS even from a windows laptop.
@@demorez5 zfs requires a minimum of 2 drives for raidz1. Do you have any redundancy in your current Nas?
@@Jims-Garage yeah, don't worry. generally i use snapraid, but have regular offsite and B2 cloud backups for important data (which are actually the VM snapshots). actually i think its pretty overkill for a bunch of movies i am never gonna watch
smb share storage 3tb but only show 27gb on pbs ??? any idea why??
PBS is not showing used size, although I mounted the share as backup-user and -group (34)?!?
Interesting, what's it showing?
@@Jims-Garage 655,36 KB! No error messages in syslog, no other idea...
@@Glatze603 have you performed a backup or just scheduled one?
@@Jims-Garage both. I already have over 200 GB of data in the ".chunk" directory and permission is backup:backup
@@Glatze603 strange! I guess it's still working though?
I would want to do a test restore, assuming the Proxmox Backup Server VM is unavailable (eg: destroyed in the same hw failure). It seems reasonable to expect a new PBS using the same NAS backend would just work for the restore, but I don't know that. That's assuming a PBS is actually needed for a restore. Proxmox might have a handy recovery utility.
BTW, incremental backups and deduplication are different concepts, but they compliment each other so well that making a distinction perhaps only belongs in pedantic comments.
Thanks, yes I'm aware that there's a nuance between the two but I didn't want to derail too much. I have covered those concepts in previous videos.
You are confusing incremental backups with deduplication ; it’s not the same thing.
Thanks. I appreciate it isn't, I've covered the nuance in previous videos and didn't want to go down the same rabbit hole again. However, PBS does use deduplication when performing incremental backups.
#1 liker :-)
First! 🥇
so you need a keyframe and then all the differentials and hope there's no issues with any of them. This strategy is old and problematic and has it's own risks. Good luck.
адский акцент у тебя чуувак. Учи английский
Nice! Thank you.
You're welcome