Great tutorial, Straight to the point with no vague explanations & confusing tangents, clear and concise. Everything a good tutorial should be. Thank you!
Great tutorial. You present the necessary material in a clear and coherent manner and you cover related information without bogging down the flow. Much appreciated!
I just love how the protect button is TOTALLY right next to the delete button. 😂 Anyways thanks for this awesome video, it got me in track with my first PBS in minutes!
Nice video. It would be cool to have a part 2 to discuss configuring tape backup and doing things like using proxmox-backup-client on remote hosts to setup backup jobs.
Thx so much for your in-depth videos on Proxmox!! as a newbie I have learnt so much! It would be great when you get around to part two. If you could also add in after backing up to an external usb drive, showing how to access it on a completely different host, that would be super helpful, thanks 🙂
I would love to see a video on how to get your backups back if you have to reinstall Proxmox Backup Server. Love your videos, simple and easy to understand
I tried this a bit ago and I think it was in one of my earlier PBS videos. I think the summary is that you have to manually create(use a text editor as the guide will give an error) a data store on a directory with existing PBS backup data and it will detect all the existing backups on disk.
This has worked great for me. Sadly I had accidentally loosened my power cable for my proxmox server by stepping on the cable and accidentally turned it off. I had to start from scratch. I purchased another server to run pbs and this helped me add it to my pve and schedule backups/pruning/garbage collections without issues. Next time, I will be prepared! Thanks!! 😊
Huge thanks for your vids and for helpful comments you've given. Made PBS server inside old 2820 NUC's "secondary" pve. Very good overview. Only thing I was hoping from PBS was to it would've been possible to mount my raid NAS box and push backups occasionally from PBS to it, but it looks like its not possible and I understand why. Not that big of a thing as I can still push critical CT/VM dumps from my main PVE to network NAS share anyway just to be sure and obviously I should just add more storage instead of one hdd to my PBS server anyway. But its start and now I atleast have one external backup of my main pve and have option to use like few CT's on this NUC pve if I encounter main pve failure or something like that. Thanks again, you've been great help for me 👍
7:24 interestingly linus added features to linux that don't require reboots to reload a new version of the kernel but basically no distro has ever enabled it
@@ElectronicsWizardry Looks like it's called "kexec" or kexec_reload or something? You might have already found it. Seems like it kills every process to reload itself though. But still interesting it exists and isn't really used. I can't link it because youtube keeps deleting comments with links in them
@@ElectronicsWizardry actually I guess red hat may support it. Using it basically brings the whole system down but the physical machine doesn't actually reboot so it is faster since there's no POST / bios stuff
@@ElectronicsWizardry wow youtube deleted my other comment... it's called "kexec" / kexec_load gonna leave the comment there if I write too much they'll prob off it again
very nice video dude, clear and precise - you cover everything, unlike others who dont even mention updating PBS post install! Would it be possible to mount the drive via SMB, to be seen in Windows, to copy the data to another location - as my PBS VM is running in PVE?
I like my compromise. I run PBS on a VM on a node and I write the data to a Nas for the backups. Then I take backups of the VM configuration itself and also save it to that Nas so if needed I can import the VM to a different node link the data and restore the down hypervisor. The other option is to run the entire server off of the very low capabilities of the nas in terms of vitualization. Either would work but I think my solution is pretty elegant right now
This video's been helping me a lot when I forget things. Quick question, though: I have two 14TB drives in mirrored ZFS storage. Creating this makes a datastore that takes the full 14TB which isn't what I want, but when I delete it to make multiple stores, they default to 1TB. Is there a way to set the size when making it, or a way to extend it after it's been made?
By default all the datastores in ZFS will share all the space, in your case 14TB. If you want to limit the size each datastore you can use quotas to limit the space, but I generally allow for a bit over over provisioning. Something like zpool set quota=1TB POOLNAME/DATASET would work here. ZFS is a bit odd in reporting space so it can take some time getting used to whats actually going on.
@@ElectronicsWizardry Understanding that, it looks like namespaces would do the same thing, but more easily and with added benefits. Thanks for the help!
Is there any drawbacks of having a PBS running only for manual/on demand backups (turning it on for backups and them off for the rest of the time)? Will Proxmox virtualization server complain if the PBS is not online most of the time?
I have done a similar setup like this without issue. I only booted on the PBS system, ran a manual backup, then shut it back down. If you try to backup to a offline PBS server it will throw an error, but the next backup will run without issues.
@@ElectronicsWizardry Great Q and A. From the research I've done it sounds like PBS eats drives for breakfast, wearing them out quickly. I am only running HDD's in mine not SSD's so I don't want them to die from too much wear and tear. So I'm going to do manual backups to keep the drives healthy as long as possible.
Yea one does a lot of random io. I’ll try to remember to check a pbs system on all ssds for a while now to see reported writes. I haven’t seen abnormally high hdd failures in pbs but am working with a tiny sample size.
Very interesting video, thank you very much for it. However, I have questions, or rather problems with the program. I want to back up to my NAS on the Windows server using a Smb share. How do I configure the SMB share there? And the next question is what happens to my lxc container where my docker application is running, including a Maria dB. Is this simply backed up using a snapshot?
If you want to use a SMB share as the PBS repo, its probably best to mount it in fstab or another auto mounting system in Linux, then have that mount path be the repository in PBS. I have done this in the paste and permissions can be a bit challenging at times. As for backing up running containers, there are some methods in the backup setting, but typically snapshots are best to backup a running container. Make sure the storage your using supports snapshots. This will essentially have the same data if you stopped the container that moment. Most programs are fine with unexpected power losses that restoring from this backup would be the same as, but run a test to makesure your database is ok when you restore these backups.
Really nice coverage of PBS as usual. Question on running two independent PBS servers with sync vs installing the PBS software along side two PVE servers. I have two HP thin clients and their specs exceed the PBS requirements. If I use the two Thin Clients power isn't an issue because they use laptop power supplies so the consumption is minimal. Space is tight in the small rack but doable. The only issue is two more servers to manage hardware wise. It sounds like using two independent Thin Clients is still a better way to approach two PSB servers that are synced. What are your thoughts.
Really depends on your goals, either of these solutions can work fine here. I'd probably put PBS on the PVE nodes if space in the rack is a concern, and this would also keep power down. I like to think of what would I do if x failed for backup planning. If a VM or file needs restoring, both of these solutions would work the same. If a PVE node died, PBS could be restore from the other working node. If both PVE nodes failed, a seperate PBS node would be easier to restore from, but assuming the drives are fine you can still get the data from the chunkstores on the disks. Hope this helps.
Yes it's helpful. I read a link where a guy responded there were a couple issues added with having PBS and PVE installed on the same server but he didn't elaborate. I figured if you were aware of them with all the experimenting you do you'd know about them and bring the issues up in your reply. Thanks again and have a good week.
@user-om1dg1sr1l I haven’t ran into any issues with pbs and pve on the same system and the docs seem to imply it’s a reasonably supported configuration. I haven’t tested every config so I’m sure there are possible issues and it’s best to monitor the system and do test restores of VMs to make sure it’s working right.
@@ElectronicsWizardry One thing I like about PBS vs PVE backups is the backup verification option in PBS but I definitely will take your suggestion on verifying a couple backups. Separate subject: A while back I gave you a suggestion on doing a PVE email notification video. So far nobody has made a detailed video of the new notification that has come out recently. I am a fan of ZFS and some comments you've made seems like you are as well. Proxmox has ZED installed but I have not seen any use of the ZFS ZED monitoring application and incorporating it into the PVE notification GUI. Your probably aware of this but if not zed.rc interfaces well with PVE's notification GUI if zed.rc isn't overly configured. If your interested let me know and I'll put together some information I learned.
Thank you for this video. I have tried to get this working in the past couple days. Runnign into problem using SMB share (Synology NAS) on the PBS system in a VM in a Proxmox cluster.
Is PBS storing data on the SMB share? I haven't tried this but I could see potential problems if aspects like atime aren't working correctly. One potential fix is use something like iscsi instead so PBS sees the Synology as a local disk.
Mate you are an absolute gem THANK YOU. Quick question tho, If I migrate to a new server, or my server just died. I saved my data to an external SSD but how can I know restore the data to a new PVE system? I was able to import the pool no worries but seem like I can not find a solution to restore the data on that SSD!
Thankyou for this video, so clear and dense. One question, is it possible to backup that vm thats running pbs or should i just have another pbs on another machine backing that vm
PBS supports syncing backups to other backup servers running PBS. I think I talked about this a bit in my PBS part 2 video and I think it’s the best way to have an offsite copy or second copy of PBS backups.
PBS lets you backup any files in a Debian or similar system. I’m working on a future video about full system backups of Proxmox and how that would all work.
In the newer version of PBS it should set it to the system theme automatically. If you want it to be different than your system theme, you can click on your name in the top right, then click on Color Theme.
Another great video, much better than other videos I've watched, one question. I'm going to cluster three PVE computers and run a few VM's with HA. I'm aware of the downside of running a PBS VM but which direction do you think is a better solution? I could run PBS with HA which alleviates some of the downside or I could run PBS on two dedicated servers and sync them so I have a backup in case one computer fails?
I'd probably run 2 copies of PBS on two of the nodes and have them synced. This depends on how you manage storage though. I'd try to keep the PBS vm from storing backups on the same storage as the VMs as its a single point of failure.
Installed PBS with apt onto a node and it went really smooth. Seems to be working really well. I'm asking you this question just in case you have actually experimented with this type of install of PBS. Couldn't log into PBS today, Brave was the issue, so I was going to ssh into PBS to pook around in the CLI but realized I couldn't using just the IP because that logs me into PVE. I couldn't find any information on getting into PBS's CLI without being in the GUI. Are you aware of any way to get into an install of PBS if it's not on bare metal all by itself? I'm thinking maybe an installation on a computer by itself is the best solution.
I understand changing the ports in the GUI. Briefly I couldn't log into PBS using 8007. I had to clear the browser cache and restart it for some reason. After that I could log back into PBS. What got me wondering is with PBS installed alongside the PVE server the only way to connect to PBS is by a web browser. If that fails there isn't any other way I know of but with PVE if a browser connection fails there is also a command line connection using ssh.
Are you trying to backup a unused disk or add one to a vm? You can click on a storage then remove to make it unused, or make the storage start with unused0: in the config file.
Hi mate!! Thank for this great video!! Could you please explain how to recover if you have installed pbs as a vm on the same host with pve ? I want to be sure if my home server blow up I can restore the data!!
Like all recovery efforts this can get complicated quickly, but generally if you mount the pbs files you can setup the pbs vm to use the existing files and it will detect all the VMs. You can also run pbs on the same host as pve and I’d probably do that here. Then you can reinstall pve and install pbs. Point it to the disks with pbs files and restore VMs.
@@ElectronicsWizardry First of all, thank you for your response! When you say, 'You can also run pbs on the same host as pve and I’d probably do that here,' do you mean installing PBS directly as if it were a package using the PVE node shell? What would be the benefit in this case? I love the way you explain things, Thanks for sharing!!
@federicoiglesias4233 yea I mean installing pbs in the shell. I think the wiki has a guide for the repository and packages that need to be added and this is a reasonably supported use case. The big advantage I see is it’s likely easier to recover pbs data if it’s on a direct hdd verses if it’s on a virtual disk when it comes to recovery.
@@ElectronicsWizardry perfect! Before setting up all the homelb I will start doing some tests with this setup to make sure I can recover it if something bad happens. By the way I just subscribed, thanks for the help!
I have used an extra PC as PBS and would now like to run the PBS as a VM. So I installed the VM and connected the hard drive from the previous PC to the PVE host. Then I imported the ZFS pool with the zpool command, it is displayed on the left. But how do I get this mounted on the VM to access the backups? I don't want to delete everything and make it new. Help!
The easiest is to pass the whole disk to the VM. Under the Vm settings, add a line like virtio0:/dev/sda(using the UUID is better so it won't change with a reboot). This will give the vm the same data as it did when it was on metal. There are a few other solutions if you want to move to a virtual disk, but you probably want to have another drive to move the data to during the process.
@@ElectronicsWizardry But what about the ZFS Pool? Simply mounting the hard drive there is not enough, is it? Doesn't some config file have to be edited there or something similar? And last But what about the ZFS Pool? Simply mounting the hard drive there is not enough, is it? Doesn't some config file have to be edited there or something similar? And last question, How can I then integrate the datastore into PBS without having to create a new one?
@@therealsprint You can mount the ZFS pool and the host will have access to all the PBS files. The issue is letting the VM access the files. You could run PBS on the host and it would work fine, otherwise you would want disk passthough to access the files in a VM.
Great video. You cut my startup time on getting my pbs working by 10x . Suggest to see if you do not record in dark mode .Not sure if its my setup but was hard to read .
PBS is pretty good at backing up Proxmox stuff (VMs and CNTs). I've been wondering about other kinds of backups like files and boot drives, to make PBS a "single, simple backup solution." Let's just take ZFS out of the equation fer now; I know ZFS snapshots is hard to beat, but with a little work you can backup files with proxmox-backup-client. With less work you could maybe make a massive syncthing VM and schedule its backup jobs with the rest of your VMs. That simplifies Proxmox stuff and files, but boot drive backups are harder to work out. Maybe some kinda of scheduled disk image cloning? idk. Any non-ZFS ideas?
I think its possible to backup a ZFS or LVM snapshot with PBS, and it should be able to just storage changes. I think with a basic script it should be pretty simple to integrate. I'll look into this, and create a future video planned about more things you can do with PBS.
Great stuff! A question. I have a home lab proxmox cluster with vm's on different nodes. In starting with PBS I setup a basic back up all VMs and containers to PBS. I had it email me after the job was completed whether successful or not. It seems like a bug but in reviewing the email I get, it only lists the VMs and containers on my first Node. I have node1, node2, node3. I get an email listing all the vm's on Node1. Doesn't mention node2 or node3. But if I go look at the PBS server I do see that it's backed up the vm's on the other 2 nodes succesfully. So the job is working just the reporting isn't. I got the same thing when I did this to just a NAS and not PBS. This is PVE 7.4. Any thoughts?
If it is, for example, not feasible to setup another PBS instance, can i copy the files from PBS to a samba share via RSYNC, to have them offsite? How would i go about restoring the PBS VM with that backed up data?
If you want a offsite backup I'd suggest having a second PBS instance. Then you can have the 2 instances sync with each other. Then if you want to restore from the offsite backup, add the offsite backup to the Proxmox server and you can access and restore all the backups.
It depends on how much space you need. If you can get away with striped mirrors, the zfs raid 10 equivalent I'd try to do that. Otherwise raidz1 would give the most space.
PBS allows you to store VMs with de-duplication, encryption, and replicate to other servers. Compared to using the backup in PVE, PBS will use much less data for additional backups as only changes are stored, and backups can be completed much faster as only changes are backed up. PVE backups are always full backups and will need to read the full VMs disk, and can take much longer and use more disk space.
Didn't watch the video yet, just commenting in blind but curiously I had problem to backup an LXC container with external drive mapped to it. It is some kind of limitation due the container limited access to host.
What filesystem is the drive? I know some filesystems can have issues on Linux. If you setup the external HDD as a Proxmox storage repository it should backup without issues, but if your reusing existing storage, I could see issues arising.
I have a question, you mentioned about restoring a whole host or migration but didn't show any example. I had a server get the ZFS pool corrupted and fail completely. If I had backups, how would I go about it restoring it from scratch?
In your case, I'd reinstall Proxmox on that system, and re setup the system again. Then I'd mount the PBS storage on the system. The backups should be visible, and you can restore all the backups on the new install. Proxmox doesn't have a great full host restore process, I have looked into a host level backups that backups the whole host, but that can get complicated very quickly.
Great tutorial, Straight to the point with no vague explanations & confusing tangents, clear and concise. Everything a good tutorial should be. Thank you!
Straight up, Excellent overview of PBS. Sweet, straight and to the point. Thanks!
Great tutorial. You present the necessary material in a clear and coherent manner and you cover related information without bogging down the flow. Much appreciated!
One of the best tutorial videos ever. Very thorough and explains every question I had
I just love how the protect button is TOTALLY right next to the delete button. 😂
Anyways thanks for this awesome video, it got me in track with my first PBS in minutes!
Awesome! No fluff; very comprehensive; always explaining "why". Love it.
Wow. This worked perfectly. Thank you!
Amazing tutorial. Keep it going. Thank you.
Hey, thanks for all these proxmox vids. They are straight to the point and easy to understand, thanks again! :)
Another insightful video, cheers mate, love ya work 🍻
Same here. :)
Thanks, helped me get my PBS mounted on the proxmox cluster, appreciate the vid.
Nice video. It would be cool to have a part 2 to discuss configuring tape backup and doing things like using proxmox-backup-client on remote hosts to setup backup jobs.
Yup. I will make a part 2 in the future with those ideas. Thanks for the idea.
Thanks! I am looking forward to part 2 with tape backup.@@ElectronicsWizardry
Thx so much for your in-depth videos on Proxmox!! as a newbie I have learnt so much! It would be great when you get around to part two. If you could also add in after backing up to an external usb drive, showing how to access it on a completely different host, that would be super helpful, thanks 🙂
I would love to see a video on how to get your backups back if you have to reinstall Proxmox Backup Server.
Love your videos, simple and easy to understand
I tried this a bit ago and I think it was in one of my earlier PBS videos. I think the summary is that you have to manually create(use a text editor as the guide will give an error) a data store on a directory with existing PBS backup data and it will detect all the existing backups on disk.
@@ElectronicsWizardry thanks for the reply, i will test it.....
@@ElectronicsWizardry found it thanks th-cam.com/video/xgLr9uaMqro/w-d-xo.htmlm7s
That's all I need... I installed as you suggested and works like a charm. Thank you ❤
This has worked great for me. Sadly I had accidentally loosened my power cable for my proxmox server by stepping on the cable and accidentally turned it off.
I had to start from scratch.
I purchased another server to run pbs and this helped me add it to my pve and schedule backups/pruning/garbage collections without issues. Next time, I will be prepared!
Thanks!! 😊
Thanks for the demo and info, have a great day
Thank you! Very helpful and straight-forward!
Great explanation, thanks !
I also use PBS on minipc nuc for my homelab cluster; It works great!
Aaaaaaand....this folks is how you make a tutorial. 10/10, liked and sub'd.
Huge thanks for your vids and for helpful comments you've given. Made PBS server inside old 2820 NUC's "secondary" pve. Very good overview. Only thing I was hoping from PBS was to it would've been possible to mount my raid NAS box and push backups occasionally from PBS to it, but it looks like its not possible and I understand why. Not that big of a thing as I can still push critical CT/VM dumps from my main PVE to network NAS share anyway just to be sure and obviously I should just add more storage instead of one hdd to my PBS server anyway. But its start and now I atleast have one external backup of my main pve and have option to use like few CT's on this NUC pve if I encounter main pve failure or something like that. Thanks again, you've been great help for me 👍
wish you went over how to configure TrueNas NFS share to the datastore to store backups on it instead of local storage on the PBS
Yea I’ll add that to my future video lists. Any ideas for other content to cover?
great video thanks a lot!
thanks, bro. awesome.
Fantastic videos. Thanks a lot!
great video
now we wait for the sync part
7:24 interestingly linus added features to linux that don't require reboots to reload a new version of the kernel but basically no distro has ever enabled it
Could you send a link? I'd love to learn more.
@@ElectronicsWizardry Looks like it's called "kexec" or kexec_reload or something? You might have already found it. Seems like it kills every process to reload itself though. But still interesting it exists and isn't really used.
I can't link it because youtube keeps deleting comments with links in them
@@ElectronicsWizardry actually I guess red hat may support it. Using it basically brings the whole system down but the physical machine doesn't actually reboot so it is faster since there's no POST / bios stuff
@@ElectronicsWizardry wow youtube deleted my other comment... it's called "kexec" / kexec_load gonna leave the comment there if I write too much they'll prob off it again
@gg-gn3re I’ll Google from that and should be able to find some more info. TH-cam doesn’t seem to like links and some text in comments.
very nice video dude, clear and precise - you cover everything, unlike others who dont even mention updating PBS post install! Would it be possible to mount the drive via SMB, to be seen in Windows, to copy the data to another location - as my PBS VM is running in PVE?
Good work !
Appreciated.
I like my compromise. I run PBS on a VM on a node and I write the data to a Nas for the backups. Then I take backups of the VM configuration itself and also save it to that Nas so if needed I can import the VM to a different node link the data and restore the down hypervisor. The other option is to run the entire server off of the very low capabilities of the nas in terms of vitualization. Either would work but I think my solution is pretty elegant right now
Great video!
This video's been helping me a lot when I forget things. Quick question, though: I have two 14TB drives in mirrored ZFS storage. Creating this makes a datastore that takes the full 14TB which isn't what I want, but when I delete it to make multiple stores, they default to 1TB. Is there a way to set the size when making it, or a way to extend it after it's been made?
By default all the datastores in ZFS will share all the space, in your case 14TB. If you want to limit the size each datastore you can use quotas to limit the space, but I generally allow for a bit over over provisioning. Something like zpool set quota=1TB POOLNAME/DATASET would work here.
ZFS is a bit odd in reporting space so it can take some time getting used to whats actually going on.
@@ElectronicsWizardry Understanding that, it looks like namespaces would do the same thing, but more easily and with added benefits. Thanks for the help!
Is there any drawbacks of having a PBS running only for manual/on demand backups (turning it on for backups and them off for the rest of the time)? Will Proxmox virtualization server complain if the PBS is not online most of the time?
I have done a similar setup like this without issue. I only booted on the PBS system, ran a manual backup, then shut it back down. If you try to backup to a offline PBS server it will throw an error, but the next backup will run without issues.
@@ElectronicsWizardry Great Q and A. From the research I've done it sounds like PBS eats drives for breakfast, wearing them out quickly. I am only running HDD's in mine not SSD's so I don't want them to die from too much wear and tear. So I'm going to do manual backups to keep the drives healthy as long as possible.
Yea one does a lot of random io. I’ll try to remember to check a pbs system on all ssds for a while now to see reported writes. I haven’t seen abnormally high hdd failures in pbs but am working with a tiny sample size.
Very interesting video, thank you very much for it. However, I have questions, or rather problems with the program. I want to back up to my NAS on the Windows server using a Smb share. How do I configure the SMB share there? And the next question is what happens to my lxc container where my docker application is running, including a Maria dB. Is this simply backed up using a snapshot?
If you want to use a SMB share as the PBS repo, its probably best to mount it in fstab or another auto mounting system in Linux, then have that mount path be the repository in PBS. I have done this in the paste and permissions can be a bit challenging at times.
As for backing up running containers, there are some methods in the backup setting, but typically snapshots are best to backup a running container. Make sure the storage your using supports snapshots. This will essentially have the same data if you stopped the container that moment. Most programs are fine with unexpected power losses that restoring from this backup would be the same as, but run a test to makesure your database is ok when you restore these backups.
Really nice coverage of PBS as usual. Question on running two independent PBS servers with sync vs installing the PBS software along side two PVE servers. I have two HP thin clients and their specs exceed the PBS requirements. If I use the two Thin Clients power isn't an issue because they use laptop power supplies so the consumption is minimal. Space is tight in the small rack but doable. The only issue is two more servers to manage hardware wise. It sounds like using two independent Thin Clients is still a better way to approach two PSB servers that are synced. What are your thoughts.
Really depends on your goals, either of these solutions can work fine here. I'd probably put PBS on the PVE nodes if space in the rack is a concern, and this would also keep power down. I like to think of what would I do if x failed for backup planning. If a VM or file needs restoring, both of these solutions would work the same. If a PVE node died, PBS could be restore from the other working node. If both PVE nodes failed, a seperate PBS node would be easier to restore from, but assuming the drives are fine you can still get the data from the chunkstores on the disks. Hope this helps.
Yes it's helpful. I read a link where a guy responded there were a couple issues added with having PBS and PVE installed on the same server but he didn't elaborate. I figured if you were aware of them with all the experimenting you do you'd know about them and bring the issues up in your reply. Thanks again and have a good week.
@user-om1dg1sr1l I haven’t ran into any issues with pbs and pve on the same system and the docs seem to imply it’s a reasonably supported configuration. I haven’t tested every config so I’m sure there are possible issues and it’s best to monitor the system and do test restores of VMs to make sure it’s working right.
@@ElectronicsWizardry One thing I like about PBS vs PVE backups is the backup verification option in PBS but I definitely will take your suggestion on verifying a couple backups.
Separate subject: A while back I gave you a suggestion on doing a PVE email notification video. So far nobody has made a detailed video of the new notification that has come out recently. I am a fan of ZFS and some comments you've made seems like you are as well. Proxmox has ZED installed but I have not seen any use of the ZFS ZED monitoring application and incorporating it into the PVE notification GUI. Your probably aware of this but if not zed.rc interfaces well with PVE's notification GUI if zed.rc isn't overly configured. If your interested let me know and I'll put together some information I learned.
Thank you for this video. I have tried to get this working in the past couple days. Runnign into problem using SMB share (Synology NAS) on the PBS system in a VM in a Proxmox cluster.
Is PBS storing data on the SMB share? I haven't tried this but I could see potential problems if aspects like atime aren't working correctly. One potential fix is use something like iscsi instead so PBS sees the Synology as a local disk.
@@ElectronicsWizardry I'll give that a shot thanks!
Mate you are an absolute gem THANK YOU. Quick question tho, If I migrate to a new server, or my server just died. I saved my data to an external SSD but how can I know restore the data to a new PVE system? I was able to import the pool no worries but seem like I can not find a solution to restore the data on that SSD!
Thankyou for this video, so clear and dense.
One question, is it possible to backup that vm thats running pbs or should i just have another pbs on another machine backing that vm
PBS supports syncing backups to other backup servers running PBS. I think I talked about this a bit in my PBS part 2 video and I think it’s the best way to have an offsite copy or second copy of PBS backups.
Would love to know if PBS can actually backup an entire host configuration aside from VMs and LXC
PBS lets you backup any files in a Debian or similar system. I’m working on a future video about full system backups of Proxmox and how that would all work.
@@ElectronicsWizardry thanks! Looking forward to that video ❤️
how did you get the dark theme in the backup server?
In the newer version of PBS it should set it to the system theme automatically. If you want it to be different than your system theme, you can click on your name in the top right, then click on Color Theme.
Another great video, much better than other videos I've watched, one question. I'm going to cluster three PVE computers and run a few VM's with HA. I'm aware of the downside of running a PBS VM but which direction do you think is a better solution? I could run PBS with HA which alleviates some of the downside or I could run PBS on two dedicated servers and sync them so I have a backup in case one computer fails?
I'd probably run 2 copies of PBS on two of the nodes and have them synced. This depends on how you manage storage though. I'd try to keep the PBS vm from storing backups on the same storage as the VMs as its a single point of failure.
I like the suggestion Thanks for the reply
Installed PBS with apt onto a node and it went really smooth. Seems to be working really well. I'm asking you this question just in case you have actually experimented with this type of install of PBS. Couldn't log into PBS today, Brave was the issue, so I was going to ssh into PBS to pook around in the CLI but realized I couldn't using just the IP because that logs me into PVE. I couldn't find any information on getting into PBS's CLI without being in the GUI. Are you aware of any way to get into an install of PBS if it's not on bare metal all by itself? I'm thinking maybe an installation on a computer by itself is the best solution.
@user-om1dg1sr1l what port are you connecting to? Typically pve is on 8006 and pbs is on 8007. Maybe changing the port will let you access pbs.
I understand changing the ports in the GUI. Briefly I couldn't log into PBS using 8007. I had to clear the browser cache and restart it for some reason. After that I could log back into PBS. What got me wondering is with PBS installed alongside the PVE server the only way to connect to PBS is by a web browser. If that fails there isn't any other way I know of but with PVE if a browser connection fails there is also a command line connection using ssh.
when i create a VM, I dont see an unused disk as its all taken up. How do I get an unused disk on a VM on proxmox?
Are you trying to backup a unused disk or add one to a vm? You can click on a storage then remove to make it unused, or make the storage start with unused0: in the config file.
Hi mate!! Thank for this great video!! Could you please explain how to recover if you have installed pbs as a vm on the same host with pve ? I want to be sure if my home server blow up I can restore the data!!
Like all recovery efforts this can get complicated quickly, but generally if you mount the pbs files you can setup the pbs vm to use the existing files and it will detect all the VMs. You can also run pbs on the same host as pve and I’d probably do that here. Then you can reinstall pve and install pbs. Point it to the disks with pbs files and restore VMs.
@@ElectronicsWizardry First of all, thank you for your response!
When you say, 'You can also run pbs on the same host as pve and I’d probably do that here,' do you mean installing PBS directly as if it were a package using the PVE node shell? What would be the benefit in this case? I love the way you explain things, Thanks for sharing!!
@federicoiglesias4233 yea I mean installing pbs in the shell. I think the wiki has a guide for the repository and packages that need to be added and this is a reasonably supported use case. The big advantage I see is it’s likely easier to recover pbs data if it’s on a direct hdd verses if it’s on a virtual disk when it comes to recovery.
@@ElectronicsWizardry perfect! Before setting up all the homelb I will start doing some tests with this setup to make sure I can recover it if something bad happens. By the way I just subscribed, thanks for the help!
Nice
I have used an extra PC as PBS and would now like to run the PBS as a VM. So I installed the VM and connected the hard drive from the previous PC to the PVE host. Then I imported the ZFS pool with the zpool command, it is displayed on the left. But how do I get this mounted on the VM to access the backups? I don't want to delete everything and make it new. Help!
The easiest is to pass the whole disk to the VM. Under the Vm settings, add a line like virtio0:/dev/sda(using the UUID is better so it won't change with a reboot). This will give the vm the same data as it did when it was on metal. There are a few other solutions if you want to move to a virtual disk, but you probably want to have another drive to move the data to during the process.
@@ElectronicsWizardry But what about the ZFS Pool? Simply mounting the hard drive there is not enough, is it? Doesn't some config file have to be edited there or something similar? And last But what about the ZFS Pool? Simply mounting the hard drive there is not enough, is it? Doesn't some config file have to be edited there or something similar? And last question, How can I then integrate the datastore into PBS without having to create a new one?
@@therealsprint You can mount the ZFS pool and the host will have access to all the PBS files. The issue is letting the VM access the files. You could run PBS on the host and it would work fine, otherwise you would want disk passthough to access the files in a VM.
Great video. You cut my startup time on getting my pbs working by 10x . Suggest to see if you do not record in dark mode .Not sure if its my setup but was hard to read .
PBS is pretty good at backing up Proxmox stuff (VMs and CNTs). I've been wondering about other kinds of backups like files and boot drives, to make PBS a "single, simple backup solution." Let's just take ZFS out of the equation fer now; I know ZFS snapshots is hard to beat, but with a little work you can backup files with proxmox-backup-client. With less work you could maybe make a massive syncthing VM and schedule its backup jobs with the rest of your VMs. That simplifies Proxmox stuff and files, but boot drive backups are harder to work out. Maybe some kinda of scheduled disk image cloning? idk. Any non-ZFS ideas?
I think its possible to backup a ZFS or LVM snapshot with PBS, and it should be able to just storage changes. I think with a basic script it should be pretty simple to integrate.
I'll look into this, and create a future video planned about more things you can do with PBS.
Great stuff! A question. I have a home lab proxmox cluster with vm's on different nodes. In starting with PBS I setup a basic back up all VMs and containers to PBS. I had it email me after the job was completed whether successful or not. It seems like a bug but in reviewing the email I get, it only lists the VMs and containers on my first Node. I have node1, node2, node3. I get an email listing all the vm's on Node1. Doesn't mention node2 or node3. But if I go look at the PBS server I do see that it's backed up the vm's on the other 2 nodes succesfully. So the job is working just the reporting isn't. I got the same thing when I did this to just a NAS and not PBS. This is PVE 7.4. Any thoughts?
If it is, for example, not feasible to setup another PBS instance, can i copy the files from PBS to a samba share via RSYNC, to have them offsite? How would i go about restoring the PBS VM with that backed up data?
If you want a offsite backup I'd suggest having a second PBS instance. Then you can have the 2 instances sync with each other. Then if you want to restore from the offsite backup, add the offsite backup to the Proxmox server and you can access and restore all the backups.
what ZFS config would you actually use with say 6 x 2TB drives in PBS?
It depends on how much space you need. If you can get away with striped mirrors, the zfs raid 10 equivalent I'd try to do that. Otherwise raidz1 would give the most space.
great tutorial. Now if you added an LTO tutorial to it :)
Yea I'd like to do some LTO stuff in the future, just need to find a cheapish drive.
@@ElectronicsWizardry The HP LTO-4 drives work with PBS and are pretty cheap these days. Only 800GB though.
Merci !
Hi! I just don’t get the point of having PBS. Everything in this video can be done in PVE, what am I missing? Thanks in advance!
PBS allows you to store VMs with de-duplication, encryption, and replicate to other servers. Compared to using the backup in PVE, PBS will use much less data for additional backups as only changes are stored, and backups can be completed much faster as only changes are backed up. PVE backups are always full backups and will need to read the full VMs disk, and can take much longer and use more disk space.
@@ElectronicsWizardry many thanks for the explanation! Love your videos, keep it up
Didn't watch the video yet, just commenting in blind but curiously I had problem to backup an LXC container with external drive mapped to it. It is some kind of limitation due the container limited access to host.
What filesystem is the drive? I know some filesystems can have issues on Linux. If you setup the external HDD as a Proxmox storage repository it should backup without issues, but if your reusing existing storage, I could see issues arising.
+1
I must be missing a point. Why do I need PBS? I can run same jobs on any storage.
I have a question, you mentioned about restoring a whole host or migration but didn't show any example.
I had a server get the ZFS pool corrupted and fail completely. If I had backups, how would I go about it restoring it from scratch?
In your case, I'd reinstall Proxmox on that system, and re setup the system again. Then I'd mount the PBS storage on the system. The backups should be visible, and you can restore all the backups on the new install.
Proxmox doesn't have a great full host restore process, I have looked into a host level backups that backups the whole host, but that can get complicated very quickly.