Setting Up my PROXMOX Backup Server!

I've gone from "no backups" to "raid is a backup" to "two zfs pools in one box", and decided it's finally time for a proper backup solution. So, I settled on Proxmox Backup Server! And today, I rebuild my HP Microserver Gen8 with 4x10T refurbished SAS drives, a new SAS controller card, and more! With this backup solution, I'm feeling a lot better about my data migration to Ceph.

If you get the error "blk_update_request: protection error" with your refurbished drives like I did, do a SCSI format - "sg_format --format /dev/sdX"

Link to the blog post with slightly more information:

Things I used in the video:

Feel free to chat with me more on my Discord server:

Timestamps:
00:00 - The Plan
03:06 - Hardware Timelapse
04:29 - Install PBS
07:38 - Setup PVE
10:35 - Next Steps
12:15 - One More Thing

Some links to products may be affiliate links, which may earn a commission for me.
#proxmox #backups

[simonjones]

Lovin' your work. I was working on a project that was almost identical to yours here and I needed some guidance with the special disks. Thanks!

[SandboChang]

Another great video and I enjoyed seeing the whole story, from assembly to software setup. Lol I actually followed your suggestion and got a Terramaster F2-223 also as a backup server (mostly for 4 other Proxmox hosts and a Windows client). While I already have a NAS system for larger files, on learning about the Terramaster I cannot resist the idea - got to backup the backups.

[adrianstephens]

An old PC is a great use for a backup server, particularly if it handles wake-on-lan.
I have a two-node proxmox cluster, one of which nodes spends most of its time asleep, but is woken to perform backups. The backup node runs a truenas scale VM with a disk passthrough to an 8TB hdd.

A backup hook script on the master wakes the backup node (wake-on-lan), waits, mount the directory and enables a proxmox storage unit that is then used to backup all my VMs and CTs. At the end it sleeps the backup server.

A cron task on the master proxmox node wakes the proxmox backup server at a certain time. Replications are scheduled to run a little time later. Then a cron job sleeps the backup server.

A cron task on a truenas VM on the master proxmox wakes the backup server. A timed backup on that truenas comes along a little later and does a zfs incremental backup to the backup truenas. A cron task then sleeps the backup server.

For completeness, a cron job running in a VM on the master proxmox node does an incremental backup of the proxmox system itself to the master truenas VM. This backup is also copied to the backup server by one of the backups above.

As a result of all the above, the backup server is awake for a couple of hours a night.
I also have another 8TB hard disk in another PC that contains a much earlier iteration of the above. I deliberately keep it in case I want to go back to where I was before I started with proxmox.

I have two reasons for wanting to sleep my backup server:
1. to save power. OK it's only about £100 worth a year.

2. My backup server is in my summer-house, which I also use to record audio-book narration (it comes with lots of hanging duvets and hot-and-cold running squirrels, but that's another story). I can't have anything with a fan or a rotating hard disk running when I'm recording. At least I can sleep a PC. I'm having less success with the squirrels.

If the above sounds hopelessly over-the-top, it probably is. But I have two reasons for doing this:
1. I'm retired. I get to play with toys, OK?
2. Before I retired, I was a software engineer. I still have indelibly ingrained in my psyche a memory of the time 40+ years ago when I did a disk-copy of the only disk (8" floppy) in existence containing an important demo half an hour before the potential customer arrived to see it, except I did the disk copy in the wrong direction, and overwrite the demo disk from the blank disk. I can't remember exactly how we covered that, but I can remember that I was not software engineer du jour. The moral of this story is that you can never have too many backups, but you can have too few.

[pavlovsky]

I was waiting for your LTO5 tape drive and happy when you carted that out. You can get a proper 3, 2, 1 solution. I setup a tapepool called tapepool ;-). Proxmox backup server makes it really easy.

[JasonsLabVideos]

I have the Gen 8 also, with 16gigs ram and a Dual port SFP+ card in it. runs Truenas, in-fact i have 2 of them, one is here at my house for a file server, the other is in another city at a friends house that gets replicated from the one locally :) wicked solid boxes.

[mjmeans]

You can also boot from the internal ODD SATA port if you enable B120i and then in SSA create a single drive raid-0 for port-5 and set it as primary and backup bootable. This works with or without a separate HBA (I tried it with HPE P222).

I also read reports that the fan noise is an issue when not using an HPE HBA because non HP/HPE HBA's don't communicate with iLO, so fan optimization falls into a sort of crippled mode. When using P222 + FBWC, my fan was quiet most of hte time, exceptions were when booting, or when the server was under heavy drive usage.

[tnetroP]

Good video. I have an HP Microserver N40L (the model before yours I think). They are fantastic devices and it's a shame that HP don't make a cost effective equivalent nowadays. I use mine as an Unraid NAS. To mitigate the power use I leave it shutdown most of the time and bring it up with WoL when needed. Then shut it down again.

[coppereva]

This gave me a starting homelab migration path idea. Could start with a single NAS server, and then as one migrates and builds up a ceph cluster, one could setup the original NAS as a backup server. I wanna make a homelab and decided on making a ceph cluster. But have honestly been too lazy to do it for now. So I may build a single NAS server and run it as a hypervisor.

[PeterBrockie]

For standard backups of Homelab stuff, is there advantage of Backup Server vs backing up archives to a share folder on a TrueNAS server (or any other share) ?

[bluesquadron]

Fingerprint also available from UI. Don't forget the backup verification and cleaning. Update, I see others also mentioned these.

[lorenz]

because of the garbage collection and verify my backup server run 24/7, i make daly about 60 backups.

[DawidKellerman]

I agree with you about those Developers ..

[WizardNumberNext]

LSI SAS9207-4i4e is newer controller, which have support for multiple MSI

I wouldn't use single parity over HDD which is bigger then 2TB as HDDs of such size run risk of bannock high enough that if single drive would fail, then you are guaranteed to lose some data. You should run double parity over drives bigger then 2TB

[geonunez]

Jejejeje you had the same reason as me for leaving truenas 😂

[AlexPlast]

If hardware capacity permits, I install pve and pbs on the same machine. pbs in this case, I install from the connected repository to pve. After that, it simply opens the web interface on port 8007 And on the same host I use not only pbs but also NAS / SAN virtual machines like ESOS, OviOS Linux, OpenMediaVault. Thus, I transfer the load of working with files from thin PVE servers to the backuper. This option suits me for an all in one solution. Sometimes I deploy pbs as a virtual machine on a thin node with an nfs or iscsi disk s SAN connected to it. This allows you to utilize the storage server for a SAN solution. Yes, in this case, pbs will not backup itself - but you can sometimes stop it and make a manual backup to a local disk and then transfer it to a safe place

[NightHawkATL]

be careful with ZFS special metadata. I had a mirror on my TrueNAS Core server and one died and the other got corrupted and afterwards I was told you should use 3 drives for special metadata for just that reason. I ended losing all of my data and had to rebuild. I decided to setup my pool this time without the special metadata and went from RAID10 to RAIDz2 with 4x 18TB EXOS drives. I also run PBS and have a RAID10 of 480GB Intel Enterprise SSDs for a total of 960GB usable space and I can't complain. I don't have massive VMs/CTs so I don't need as much space to store backups. I really like having my PBS server. I know you will enjoy it as well.

[ivanmaglica]

No way! I have two of these HP MicroServers Gen8 for my business backup, one at my office, one offsite. they run proxmox with LXC environment set to backup my main servers daily and sync each other weekly.

[richardhoekstra]

I also use the cheap Kingston SSD 250Gb for these kind of things works perfect no problem

[iminhull]

Great video. Very informative. Please could you tell me how you connected two SSDs to the 5th internal SATA port?

[NetBandit]

Ahhhh! You baited me. Here we go:
1: Used hard drives. Yikes. Wipe the drives with wipefs or shred. Use badblocks to test that the drives aren't junk (SMART info can't be trusted)
2: Tapes suck. 30TB of backup will take 20 LTO-5 tapes, which costs $300, and will take 60 hours to write. Nevermind the cost of the tape drive and controller. Even LTO-9 only holds 18TB.
3: Booting from SD (and USB) is deprecated. It's a bad idea as they aren't very reliable.
4: ZFS special devices aren't going to be of much benefit in a backup scenario. A better use for those would be as boot/system drives.
5: RAIDZ1 with used drives. You're flying awfully close to the sun. Make that RAIDZ2 and suddenly you are in the capacity range where a single 20TB HDD can be used for backup.
But maybe figuring it out (the hard way) is the adventure.