I have a confession to make.
I’ve been working in IT for about 6/7 years now and I’ve been selfhosting for about 5. And in all this time, in my work environment or at home, I’ve never bothered about backups. I know they are essential for every IT network, but I never cared to learn it. Just a few copies of some harddisks here and there and that is actually all I know. I’ve tried a few times, but I’ve often thought the learning curve to steep, or the commandline gave me some errors I didn’t want to troubleshoot.
It is time to make a change. I’m looking for an easy to learn backup solution for my home network. I’m running a Proxmox server with about 8 VMs on it, including a NAS full of photos and a mediaserver with lots of movies and shows. It has 2x 8TB disks in a RAID1 set. Next to that I’ve got 2 windows laptops and a linux desktop.
What could be a good backup solution that is also easy to learn?
I’ve tried Borg, but I couldn’t figure out all the commandline options. I’m leaning towards Proxmox Backup Server, but I don’t know if it works well with something other than my Proxmox server. I’ve also thought about Veeam since I encounter it sometimes at work, but the free version supports only up to 10 devices.
My plan now is to create 2 backup servers, 1 onsite, running on something like a raspberry pi or an HP elitedesk. The other would be an HP microserver N40L, which I can store offsite.
What could be the perfect backup solution for me?
EDIT:
After a few replies I feel the need to mention that I’m looking for a free and centrally managed option. Thanks!
I’ve been working in IT for about 6/7 years now and I’ve been selfhosting for about 5. And in all this time, in my work environment or at home, I’ve never bothered about backups.
That really is quite a confession to make, especially in a professional context. But good for you to finally come around!
I can’t really recommend a solution with a GUI but I can tell you a bit about how I backup my homelab. Like you I have a Proxmox cluster with several VMs and a NAS. I’ve mounted some storage from my NAS into Proxmox via NFS. This is where I let Proxmox store backups of all VMs.
On my NAS I use restic to backup to two targets: An offsite NAS which contains full backups and additionally Wasabi S3 for the stuff I really don’t want to lose. I like restic a lot and found it rather easy to use (also coming from borg/borgmatic). It supports many different storage backends and multithreading (looking at you, borg).
I run TrueNAS, so I make use of ZFS Snapshots too. This way I have multiple layers of defense against data loss with varying restore times for different scenarios.
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Do you use restic to move the backups to remote on it’s own? Or are you using rclone to move your restic repo to remote?
I don’t use rclone at all, restic is perfectly capable to backup to remote storage on its own.
Proxmox backup server is free and absolutely essential in a PVE system. You can restore entire VMs, volumes, folders and files. You can keep many versions with it’s fantastic dedup system, you can mirror the backups to USB drives or other PBS remotes. If you’re using a ZFS filesystem on your PVE storage, then every backup is snapshotted at a point in time to prevent database issues on restore.
I’m going to try that for my servers! What do you use for your files (music, photos and such)?
I use a docker of Nextcloud. I have a Debian LXC on Proxmox that runs my docker containers, and since the backend storage is ZFS, I can snapshot it before any major upgrades to the OS or the docker containers. I have restored a whole LXC from PBS when something like my mailserver has gotten borked if I’ve forgotten to snapshot.
If you are not afraid of Windows: Veeam B/R (Community Edition)
It has a nice GUI and works very well.
GUI is well explained, knowledgebases for Hyper-V, VMware and some others.
The Agent can be deployed manually and linux agents can write to a repository.
I don’t think Proxmox is a supported hypervisor.Community Edition is free
I think up to 10 workloadsMaybe take a look.
You could try to get hands on a NFR license that has the premium features with a 1 year runtime
Edit: I use Windows Agent for my personal rig and backup via SMB.
We use it at work so I am partially biased to that solution.I’ll second Veeam. It only runs on Windows but as far as backup and recovery software goes it’s the gold standard and the competition is not even close.
You ever had it back up a proxmox cluster? I’d say it’s suboptimal advice to go for veeam for this use-case.
Yeah - i use veeam for backups at work, but we run VMware, some MS servers and use rsync or bacula for our Linux boxes. A great product.
What would you recommend for me?
I have a homelab with:
1 laptop on Windows
3 desktop PCs (2 on Linux, 1 on Windows)
1 server running Proxmox VE
1 old 2 bay Synology NAS.
Maybe have a look at urbackup. Gui, “centrally managed”, free…
And please, as mentioned in another comment, have a look at Borgmatic. It makes Borg really easy to use and has some super handy features. Super easy backups to multiple locations by just adding a line in the config… And I just love the healthchecks integration. Set and forget until either healthchecks notifies you of a problem or you really need to recover data.
I’m gonna look into that! Borgmatic looks a lot easier than borg, but that CLI still scares me. I like working with Linux commands but something new like backups makes me want to click in a GUI to set everything up.
When I got started I preferred GUI apps too. The more you use them, the more you get to appreciate cli tools. Meanwhile I find cli tools better, they are just more precise and have a good way to push you to use them correctly. Also they are mostly well documented and even offer “on the fly” help with -h flags or alike… also the get started page of Borgmatic is really well written. Just play around with it ;)
I can’t speak for Proxmox specifically, but Duplicacy works great on my unRAID box and has a fully built out GUI. One of the best solutions I’ve found for my uses so far.
I too use duplicacy. I am just worried one day I can’t start the server and I’m stuck without access to duplicacy. What would be the solution? Try to get the folder from the appdata and point a new docker container to it?
I use the daily/weekly/monthly pattern for machine backups:
- Use a rsync job to copy whatever you deem important from the target machine to a backup dir. Run this once a day.
- Once a week, sync the daily dir to a weekly dir.
- Once a month, take a snapshot of the weekly dir as a tarball.
In addition to that I use Pika Backup (it’s a very user friendly GUI for Borg) to make incremental backups of the monthly dir to a couple of external HDDs.
I use Restic, for the incremental backups and deduplication. I feel tar balls won’t factor in those two cases.
If you use a backup solution that does incremental/deduplication you can probably replace the monthly tarball with a monthly deduplicative backup.
Tarballs are useful in repetitive backups, like for example long term archiving to optical media (burning Blu Rays).
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Good on you to finally get into it, I switched to something systematic only very recently myself (previously it was “copy important stuff to an external HDD whenever I think of it”).
The one thing that I learned (luckily the easy-ish way) is: test your backup. Yes, it’s annoying, but since you rarely (ideally never!) will need to restore the backup it’s incredibly easy to think that everything in your system is working and it either never having worked properly or it somehow started failing at some point.
A backup solution that has never been tested via a full restore of at least something has to be assumed to be broken.
Which reminds me: I have to set up the cron job to periodically test a percentage of all backed up data.
I decided to use Kopia, btw, but can’t really say if that’s well-suited for your goals.
I like BackupPC, it’ll do what you want but it may be more challenging to learn than some of these other options.
You can use syncthing to get files from all of your devices to your central server and then use something like FreeFileSync to backup the entire folder structure to another drive.
I backup Proxmox VMs and templates onto my NAS, and from there into the cloud. If you don’t want the cloud maybe auto backup to an external drive and keep it somewhere safe (out of range of a possible disaster to your home)
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I’ve seen in this thread:
Fewer Letters More Letters DNS Domain Name Service/System ESXi VMWare virtual machine hypervisor LXC Linux Containers NAS Network-Attached Storage RAID Redundant Array of Independent Disks for mass storage Unifi Ubiquiti WiFi hardware brand
6 acronyms in this thread; the most compressed thread commented on today has 7 acronyms.
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I’m running Urbackup, runs on my thin client server and backups all windows machines and itself. But is actually seems quite unreliable.
What makes it unreliable?
I use rclone and the gui https://rclone.org/gui/ in my proxmox environment.
That said, the backup itself is still initiated via batch script.
Edit: to backup my PC and all smartphones to my server I use syncthing.
And the rclone backs the data to an cloud system. Some parts encrypted
I use rclone as well and was in your position not long ago (looking for a non complicated backup solution). Landed on rclone based on feedback and what I read online. Spent about an hour reading rcl one’s documentation and built a script to do the backups daily.
OP if you go the rclone route, I can share my template script with you to get you started.
The script is pretty simple: makes sure there’s a logging file created on the system ahead of time, timestamps, the actual backup job, error checking, notification via discord (success or failure) and log output to the file created above.
Edit: I forgot to mention that recently (don’t know exactly when) Proxmox released something call Proxmox Backup Server (PBS). I have not used it but I imagine it integrates well with your Proxmox cluster but even then you may want to look at a complimentary solution to backup that server too.
Edit: Even if you go with Proxmox Backup Server, you may want to thinking about how you backup the backup server. Preferably off site, in my opinion.
For Windows, robocopy on a scheduled task.
For Linux, rsync in cron
And then just copy everything to a share somewhere.
I know you asked for a gui, but these are literally single line commands so it should be very easy to set up.
