How to setup PBS to backup your Proxmox VMs and Containers

In this video I go over all the basics with PBS. I go over how to setup PBS, create and restore backups in Proxmox, and what to keep an eye on in PBS.
Let me know if you have any more questions about PBS in the comments, or topics that I could go into more detail about
00:00 Intro
00:31 Where PBS can be installed
01:01 Recommended hardware
03:38 Installing PBS
06:16 Configuring PBS
07:50 Setting up disks and repositories
09:17 Adding PBS to Proxmox VE
14:36 Managing Backup in PBS
18:34 Restoring Backups
20:07 Things to keep an eye on in PBS
21:43 Conclusion

[@irreverentgeek]

Straight up, Excellent overview of PBS. Sweet, straight and to the point. Thanks!

[@derekp6636]

Thanks, helped me get my PBS mounted on the proxmox cluster, appreciate the vid.

[@brotherbeagle]

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!

[@maxg4958]

Awesome! No fluff; very comprehensive; always explaining "why". Love it.

[@christophostermayer1694]

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!

[@aliihsandonmezer6667]

That's all I need... I installed as you suggested and works like a charm. Thank you ❤

[@omarrizo5816]

Hey, thanks for all these proxmox vids. They are straight to the point and easy to understand, thanks again! :)

[@pavlovsky0]

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.

[@ElectronicsWizardry]

Yup. I will make a part 2 in the future with those ideas. Thanks for the idea.

[@johnvanwinkle4351]

Thanks! I am looking forward to part 2 with tape backup.@@ElectronicsWizardry

[@MrBarbinator]

Another insightful video, cheers mate, love ya work 🍻

[@mentalplayground]

Same here. :)

[@chrisumali9841]

Thanks for the demo and info, have a great day

[@cambian]

Thank you! Very helpful and straight-forward!

[@robbuurman1667]

Great explanation, thanks !

[@jothain]

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 👍

[@BoyanYanakiev]

Fantastic videos. Thanks a lot!

[@MaxTheDog167]

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!! 😊

[@RomanShein1978]

Great video!

[@sdc-it_de]

Good work !

[@Shimi1990]

great video thanks a lot!

[@user-cy9zz1tj7e]

thanks, bro. awesome.

[@horst.zimmermann]

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

[@ElectronicsWizardry]

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.

[@horst.zimmermann]

@@ElectronicsWizardry thanks for the reply, i will test it.....

[@horst.zimmermann]

@@ElectronicsWizardry found it thanks kzbin.info/www/bejne/rpivo2yrlrKkqNEm7s

[@L76videos]

great video now we wait for the sync part

[@PinchOfLuck]

Appreciated.

[@fearthesmeag]

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?

[@jenniferw8963]

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.

[@ElectronicsWizardry]

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.

[@jenniferw8963]

@@ElectronicsWizardry I'll give that a shot thanks!

[@monish05m]

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

[@ElectronicsWizardry]

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.

[@raul230285]

Nice

[@ricksnow8785]

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?

[@xxcr4ckzzxx840]

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?

[@ElectronicsWizardry]

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.

[@user-om1dg1sr1l]

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?

[@ElectronicsWizardry]

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.

[@user-om1dg1sr1l]

I like the suggestion Thanks for the reply

[@user-om1dg1sr1l]

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.

[@ElectronicsWizardry]

@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.

[@user-om1dg1sr1l]

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.

[@user-zc2uj9oj7r]

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.

[@ElectronicsWizardry]

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.

[@user-om1dg1sr1l]

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.

[@ElectronicsWizardry]

@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.

[@user-om1dg1sr1l]

@@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.

[@im2geek4you]

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?

[@ElectronicsWizardry]

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.

[@tomg9029]

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 .

[@pylang3803]

what ZFS config would you actually use with say 6 x 2TB drives in PBS?

[@ElectronicsWizardry]

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.

[@pylang3803]

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?

[@ElectronicsWizardry]

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.

[@AdrianuX1985]

+1

[@customzpcbuild8267]

how did you get the dark theme in the backup server?

[@ElectronicsWizardry]

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.

[@federicoiglesias4233]

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!!

[@ElectronicsWizardry]

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.

[@federicoiglesias4233]

@@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!!

[@ElectronicsWizardry]

@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.

[@federicoiglesias4233]

@@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!

[@russellmm]

great tutorial. Now if you added an LTO tutorial to it :)

[@ElectronicsWizardry]

Yea I'd like to do some LTO stuff in the future, just need to find a cheapish drive.

[@russellmm]

@@ElectronicsWizardry The HP LTO-4 drives work with PBS and are pretty cheap these days. Only 800GB though.

[@therealsprint]

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!

[@ElectronicsWizardry]

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.

[@therealsprint]

@@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?

[@ElectronicsWizardry]

@@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.

[@JonatanCastro-secondary]

Would love to know if PBS can actually backup an entire host configuration aside from VMs and LXC

[@ElectronicsWizardry]

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.

[@JonatanCastro-secondary]

@@ElectronicsWizardry thanks! Looking forward to that video ❤️

[@user-xl5kd6il6c]

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?

[@ElectronicsWizardry]

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.

[@bluesquadron593]

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.

[@ElectronicsWizardry]

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.

[@gg-gn3re]

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]

Could you send a link? I'd love to learn more.

[@gg-gn3re]

@@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

[@gg-gn3re]

@@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

[@gg-gn3re]

@@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

[@ElectronicsWizardry]

@gg-gn3re I’ll Google from that and should be able to find some more info. KZbin doesn’t seem to like links and some text in comments.

[@lucaspanetta7037]

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!

[@ElectronicsWizardry]

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.

[@lucaspanetta7037]

@@ElectronicsWizardry many thanks for the explanation! Love your videos, keep it up

[@manuUnixDev]

Merci !