When doing research for this video I noticed that doing cloud backups of PBS can be expensive due to the way PBS works. I was thinking of starting a service with hosted offsite PBS backups, and unlike other solutions, the service would be built around PBS backups and have the hardware required for PBS to work well while keeping the price down. Let me know if this idea seems interesting to you or if you have any thoughts by replying to this comment or sending me an email.
Tailscale should work fine for PBS offsite backups. It should work like a VPN where the systems can send data to each other, and the backups will work fine. Backing up other devices will be a pain. You can do some hacky methods where you backup to a intermediate storage and then backup that intermediate storage with PBS, but that's messy.
Huge amount of info, I appreciate the effort. I am currently Tuxis free tier as a cloud PBS but I am interested in your solution aswell, probably a good way to support the chanel too.
Wouldn't it be better to have a service that I can sync my backup to - so PBS don't have to re-read data pool again? Assuming it would be a complementary service to local PBS backup. From my perspective - this would be interesting, but only if it would be cheap enough (for lowest tier at least - that would be my "last resort" copy). On the other hand - it wouldn't have to be blazing fast and can be all rust - because upload speed will be a limiting factor (at least for me).
Great Video/Job Brandon, Very well covered. Precise and to the point. I needed this because I was looking in to using PBS as my go to backup solution. Thanks again.
With my light home server, I run PBS as a CT on the host PVE, syncing to a PBS CT running on my friend's host PVE across the WAN. One thing I haven't done is test the difference between backing up the local PBS CT to the remote PBS vs syncing the datastore as I do now. Might be interesting because it's only for disaster recovery that I ever expect to restore from the remote PBS vs restoring from the local PBS CT running on the host PVE. Great video on PBS and definitely helped in understanding more about the namespace features and how they could be used. Thanks !
@@oli4572 then that’s not the way you go. Backing up to remote PBS vs s backing up to local PBS then syncing local PBS data store to a remote PBS data store, neither of these are local backups, which are wholly unsatisfactory as a true backup solution.
@@fiveangle Of course it is the way I go. And it works without any issues since more then a year now... And I had several restores from local backup back to my online server. I guess you missunderstand! I have two Nvme SSD with ZFS in RaidZ in my online PVE, where my VMs and CTs are running. Beside that two ther are two built in 20TB HDDs which server as "local" backup storage from Nvme over to HDD. These backups from there are synced to my local NAS and into my homlab PVE. So I have a clustered backup on my NAS plus a running copy of the VM on my homelab PVE server, a 1:1 copy from my productive online PVE machine.
@ElectronicsWizardry: Great information and so useful for a lot of my use cases - many thanks! I would be interested in what's the best method to backup a PVE-node (w/o any VMs or LXCs), just the node itself. You were asking for other topics for further PBS-vids - that could be one.
Agreed. I have 2 PBS, one syncing from the other, but what happens if my PVE node dies? I‘ve not found much useful information about that, except for copying some directories from the node to an external storage.
@@Mr.Jean-Paul there is a great video about this on the chanel - how to "revive" your host after forced pve reinstall. A lot of useful info if you want to do this manually. But I'd prefer to know how to do it by restoring pve config from backup, not by hand
Proxmox doesn't really do a full host restore easily. I'm trying to think of a way to get a full host restore that can be explained and preformed simply. I'll make a video about full host restore sometime.
There's always the option to treat your PVE host as cattle and manage it using Infrastructure as code tools (ie: Terraform + Ansible) so you can easily recreate instead of restore. It depends on the amount of work you want to put in, or if you are in a professional environment vs just doing click-ops at home.
@mikekane9734 pbs can’t backup windows desktops directly. I think there is a third party app that I haven’t tested that lets you back up files on windows but I don’t think it will do a bootable image. I think veeam is a good option if you want windows backups.
I have a question: I cannot use the backup_user to create a PBS storage on my PVE data Center, while 2FA is enabled for the backup_user. Any chance someone could explain, how to use a 2FA protected user with a PBS storage? I also tried it with the Token user, but the same thing... Maybe I am simply to blind to see through it and it is simple? Help would be nice.
I wouldn't be suprised if 2fa accounts don't work well for service accounts on stuff like PVE. I haven't tested it, but in their docs they seem to reccomend tokens for this type of use case.
@@ElectronicsWizardry Thanks a lot, with the PBS token credentials I was able to connect my datastore with my PVE. It shows up there now as a PBS Storage and 2FA also works like a charme. Finally I got that second layer of protection, I was looking for, login wise with 2FA and datastore wise with the Token and it's permission. Next step will be to disable ssh login with password and use rsa keys instead. Kudos!
Quite new to PM ad´nd have one small 1L homeserver based on it and I have old celeron NUC that I used as home NAS for years. PBS seems too much for me to put on that NUC. I suppose I should just use it as "pve2" and backup to it, though I'm wondering if I should make cluster out of them or does backuping to another pve work just fine. Any opinions about the scenario?
If you just want to do backups, I'd install PBS instead of PVE as it has all the backup packages already for you. You can install Proxmox backup on PVE if you want. You can make a cluster, but I will warn you to avoid a 2 node cluster as there can be issues if one node goes down.
@@ElectronicsWizardry Thanks a lot for the input. I've been avoiding cluster creation as well generally it's bad to jump into configurations not familiar, learned that the hardway ages ago :) It didn't even occure to me about creating PBS inside PVE. I suppose that could be option. I could still then use like Pi-hole etc. without too much hassle if I want to fiddle with PVE1 hardware. Btw does Proxmox PVE backup jobs begin immeadiately after PBS server comes back online, if its been down or do they need some acknowledgement to resume, not meaning interrupted backup jobs, just if PBS has been down on scheduled backup start?
@@jothain PBS generally handles power outages and running a mostly offline backup server. The backup jobs on the PVE host will determine when backups occur. If the PBS server is offline during a backup it will fail, and try again during the next backup. Skipping backups won't cause a issue.
Great Proxmox content I setup a Proxmox server and I'm running some vm's I backed them up on a USB drive after watching one of your videos. All backed up perfect the trouble I have is I removed the usb drive from the server with out un mounting it I guess. Now the server is showing backup(eve) status unknown with a question mark. If I reinsert the usb drive it acts as if it's never been in with no directory and still saying backup(pve) with status unknown. How can I remove this from the PVE listing as it's stopping me making vm's now? If I click on it it says directory no mounted how do I remove this ? Any help would be much appreciated thanks in advance.
Unplugging a drive, even unexpected should cause the node to show the question mark. I'd give the system a reboot if you haven't already. I have also had some luck restart some of the pve services if a node shows a question mark.
Tape is interesting to me, and I want to see how all it works. I'll need to get my hands on some hardware and do some testing first. Let me know of a place with well priced tape drives.
I've wrote a python script with a nice wizard to backup and restore proxmox pve host to PBS. Unfortunately I've lost it on a lost volume. Next time I do this I'll push it to gitlab asap.
Thanks for all these extra details. I setup the backup user and has been working. But I notice I have been getting an error in PVE node. It seems the backup finished, but the prune fails?? ERROR: prune 'vm/109': proxmox-backup-client failed: Error: permission check failed - missing Datastore.Modify|Datastore.Prune on /datastore/spike-pbs1 ERROR: Backup of VM 109 failed - error pruning backups - check log Did I miss a step?
When doing research for this video I noticed that doing cloud backups of PBS can be expensive due to the way PBS works. I was thinking of starting a service with hosted offsite PBS backups, and unlike other solutions, the service would be built around PBS backups and have the hardware required for PBS to work well while keeping the price down. Let me know if this idea seems interesting to you or if you have any thoughts by replying to this comment or sending me an email.
Tailscale should work fine for PBS offsite backups. It should work like a VPN where the systems can send data to each other, and the backups will work fine.
Backing up other devices will be a pain. You can do some hacky methods where you backup to a intermediate storage and then backup that intermediate storage with PBS, but that's messy.
Huge amount of info, I appreciate the effort.
I am currently Tuxis free tier as a cloud PBS but I am interested in your solution aswell, probably a good way to support the chanel too.
Wouldn't it be better to have a service that I can sync my backup to - so PBS don't have to re-read data pool again? Assuming it would be a complementary service to local PBS backup. From my perspective - this would be interesting, but only if it would be cheap enough (for lowest tier at least - that would be my "last resort" copy). On the other hand - it wouldn't have to be blazing fast and can be all rust - because upload speed will be a limiting factor (at least for me).
A) Yes, would be interested
B) What's a good email?
My email is electronicswizardry@gmail.com and also on my channel about page.
Great Video/Job Brandon, Very well covered. Precise and to the point. I needed this because I was looking in to using PBS as my go to backup solution. Thanks again.
Thank you very much for the concentrated information. You are changing the way our production system works . I do really appreciate your efforts .
appreciate this. Love the sections as well. 100% helpful.
Thanks
Great video! You made everything clear! Keep doing it man 💪🏻
Just found this, looking to setup a remote PBS at my dad’s house. This is perfect, thanks so much!
Liar i didn't even see step by step just talking bunch of Jibirish I understand tho but i was expecting something more
This was super helpful. On point and the perfect density. Thank you!
With my light home server, I run PBS as a CT on the host PVE, syncing to a PBS CT running on my friend's host PVE across the WAN. One thing I haven't done is test the difference between backing up the local PBS CT to the remote PBS vs syncing the datastore as I do now. Might be interesting because it's only for disaster recovery that I ever expect to restore from the remote PBS vs restoring from the local PBS CT running on the host PVE. Great video on PBS and definitely helped in understanding more about the namespace features and how they could be used. Thanks !
That's the way I go. I backup to my online server from ZFS ssd to Hdd. From there I do sync job to my home server to have a offsite Backup available.
@@oli4572 then that’s not the way you go. Backing up to remote PBS vs s backing up to local PBS then syncing local PBS data store to a remote PBS data store, neither of these are local backups, which are wholly unsatisfactory as a true backup solution.
@@fiveangle Of course it is the way I go. And it works without any issues since more then a year now...
And I had several restores from local backup back to my online server.
I guess you missunderstand! I have two Nvme SSD with ZFS in RaidZ in my online PVE, where my VMs and CTs are running. Beside that two ther are two built in 20TB HDDs which server as "local" backup storage from Nvme over to HDD. These backups from there are synced to my local NAS and into my homlab PVE. So I have a clustered backup on my NAS plus a running copy of the VM on my homelab PVE server, a 1:1 copy from my productive online PVE machine.
this was a great tutorial man ty
@ElectronicsWizardry: Great information and so useful for a lot of my use cases - many thanks! I would be interested in what's the best method to backup a PVE-node (w/o any VMs or LXCs), just the node itself. You were asking for other topics for further PBS-vids - that could be one.
Agreed. I have 2 PBS, one syncing from the other, but what happens if my PVE node dies? I‘ve not found much useful information about that, except for copying some directories from the node to an external storage.
@@Mr.Jean-Paul there is a great video about this on the chanel - how to "revive" your host after forced pve reinstall. A lot of useful info if you want to do this manually. But I'd prefer to know how to do it by restoring pve config from backup, not by hand
Proxmox doesn't really do a full host restore easily. I'm trying to think of a way to get a full host restore that can be explained and preformed simply. I'll make a video about full host restore sometime.
@@ElectronicsWizardry That would be great! Your videos are always well explained and much appreciated. Thanks for thinking about it!
There's always the option to treat your PVE host as cattle and manage it using Infrastructure as code tools (ie: Terraform + Ansible) so you can easily recreate instead of restore. It depends on the amount of work you want to put in, or if you are in a professional environment vs just doing click-ops at home.
Thank you for your videos! Please consider upgrading your microphone!
Thanks for the Super! I have changed mic since this video came out. Do you think it sounds better in my recent few videos?
@@ElectronicsWizardry , oh I thought it was one of the most recent vids. Yes, on fresher vids sound is better. Thank you!
Thanks for the feed back. I think that video was ~7 months old, and I changed audio since then.
@@ElectronicsWizardry , oh is there a way to backup windows desktops? Can PBS also do that?
@mikekane9734 pbs can’t backup windows desktops directly. I think there is a third party app that I haven’t tested that lets you back up files on windows but I don’t think it will do a bootable image. I think veeam is a good option if you want windows backups.
You are the best!
Great content, tnx..
I have a question: I cannot use the backup_user to create a PBS storage on my PVE data Center, while 2FA is enabled for the backup_user. Any chance someone could explain, how to use a 2FA protected user with a PBS storage? I also tried it with the Token user, but the same thing... Maybe I am simply to blind to see through it and it is simple? Help would be nice.
I wouldn't be suprised if 2fa accounts don't work well for service accounts on stuff like PVE. I haven't tested it, but in their docs they seem to reccomend tokens for this type of use case.
@@ElectronicsWizardry Thanks a lot, with the PBS token credentials I was able to connect my datastore with my PVE. It shows up there now as a PBS Storage and 2FA also works like a charme. Finally I got that second layer of protection, I was looking for, login wise with 2FA and datastore wise with the Token and it's permission. Next step will be to disable ssh login with password and use rsa keys instead. Kudos!
36:00 what is this network monitoring tool?
edit: found nload
Thank You.
Thank you!
thanks for the video. If I may ask, where did you get that t-shirt?
Proxmox sent me the shirt and some other merch a bit ago. I didn’t see an online for their merch last time I looked unfortunately.
@@ElectronicsWizardry I see, thanks for letting me know😁
Quite new to PM ad´nd have one small 1L homeserver based on it and I have old celeron NUC that I used as home NAS for years. PBS seems too much for me to put on that NUC. I suppose I should just use it as "pve2" and backup to it, though I'm wondering if I should make cluster out of them or does backuping to another pve work just fine. Any opinions about the scenario?
If you just want to do backups, I'd install PBS instead of PVE as it has all the backup packages already for you. You can install Proxmox backup on PVE if you want. You can make a cluster, but I will warn you to avoid a 2 node cluster as there can be issues if one node goes down.
@@ElectronicsWizardry Thanks a lot for the input. I've been avoiding cluster creation as well generally it's bad to jump into configurations not familiar, learned that the hardway ages ago :)
It didn't even occure to me about creating PBS inside PVE. I suppose that could be option. I could still then use like Pi-hole etc. without too much hassle if I want to fiddle with PVE1 hardware. Btw does Proxmox PVE backup jobs begin immeadiately after PBS server comes back online, if its been down or do they need some acknowledgement to resume, not meaning interrupted backup jobs, just if PBS has been down on scheduled backup start?
@@jothain PBS generally handles power outages and running a mostly offline backup server. The backup jobs on the PVE host will determine when backups occur. If the PBS server is offline during a backup it will fail, and try again during the next backup. Skipping backups won't cause a issue.
@@ElectronicsWizardry Once again. Thank you very much for clarification 👍
Great Proxmox content I setup a Proxmox server and I'm running some vm's I backed them up on a USB drive after watching one of your videos. All backed up perfect the trouble I have is I removed the usb drive from the server with out un mounting it I guess. Now the server is showing backup(eve) status unknown with a question mark. If I reinsert the usb drive it acts as if it's never been in with no directory and still saying backup(pve) with status unknown. How can I remove this from the PVE listing as it's stopping me making vm's now? If I click on it it says directory no mounted how do I remove this ? Any help would be much appreciated thanks in advance.
Unplugging a drive, even unexpected should cause the node to show the question mark. I'd give the system a reboot if you haven't already. I have also had some luck restart some of the pve services if a node shows a question mark.
I'm interested in the tape support aspect. Can one backup to disk and then to tape or is it limited to one destination?
Tape is interesting to me, and I want to see how all it works. I'll need to get my hands on some hardware and do some testing first. Let me know of a place with well priced tape drives.
I've wrote a python script with a nice wizard to backup and restore proxmox pve host to PBS. Unfortunately I've lost it on a lost volume. Next time I do this I'll push it to gitlab asap.
Thanks for all these extra details. I setup the backup user and has been working. But I notice I have been getting an error in PVE node. It seems the backup finished, but the prune fails??
ERROR: prune 'vm/109': proxmox-backup-client failed: Error: permission check failed - missing Datastore.Modify|Datastore.Prune on /datastore/spike-pbs1
ERROR: Backup of VM 109 failed - error pruning backups - check log
Did I miss a step?
Did you setup a different account or are you using the root account. This feels like a permissions error to me.
Ah, had to change Role to DatastorePowerUser to add prune. Not sure how that is a PowerUser.
@@ElectronicsWizardry I had setup the backupUser like in the video.