Best Proxmox backup solution?

I need to keep some VMs backed up, so if my server's drive fails they don't go down with the ship. What is the best way to do this?

Should I set up a NAS and mount an NFS share, and set up a backup job to dump to that one day a week?

Should I go for a RAID setup in the server itself, or is that exposing myself to data corruption more than with a FreeNAS setup using NFS?

 

Well RAID1 will keep everything running in the event of a disk failure, but it doesn't protect you from other types of data loss. Really you shouldn't run RAID (or something raid-like) without backups too if the data is important.

If you can only have one or the other then you need to decide if you want availability or security. As in is it more important that the system doesn't go down or that you can recover from data loss.

 

Personally I would argue that availability isn't that important in a home environment and I would definitely go for a backup over a raid set up. Backups are much more versatile than redundancy as they don't just protect you from hardware failure but also let you roll back to a previous version if you mess something up or restore files which have been deleted,  etc.

 

well, you have a lot of options. you can cluster proxmox even and if one piece of hardware bites the dust, the other one can start up the vm from disk.

I have used DRBD mirroring for low-cost two node setups (not recommended). iSCSI works better than NFS generally if you want to go for a san-ish setup

 

It's much more simple imo.

Just don't use proxmox, but use OpenSuSE or Fedora Server, and the Xenserver that comes with those. Put the host on btrfs, another option is to put / on btrfs and userspace on XFS, but I would go for btrfs. Add the different redundant disks as volumes to the btrfs pool and make btrfs mirror them, and snapshot the entire thing externally. So if a disk fails, nothing happens at all, if the entire system fails, you can let a backup system that holds the snapshot start the VM.

Well, as much as I would love to cluster and use RAID on both machines, I'm a broke kid, so that's not as much of an option as I'd prefer it to be :P

I had an epiphany tonight, I have shared hosting with BlueHost. and they have no limit on disk space, as long as you don't just act insane with it. So I'll set up a Proxmox backup job to back up my really important VMs to a directory that syncs to an OwnCloud install or even over raw FTP on the BlueHost server every week. Then I have data-center level redundancy, and even if my house burns down I still have my DNS server :P

Thanks again, I'll definitely look into Zoltan/Wendell's options in the future, but for now the BlueHost server gets the job done for free.

You can continue with CloudBacko Lite Software for VM backup. Because, currently i am using CloudBacko software and the results are very good. Last month every data in my system got deleted, but thanks to Cloudbacko software i am able to restore my data again. So CloudBacko software gives us full security and protection to our data.

In that case, if you have data caps on your ISP plan. Be careful that there isn't any hidden charges for uploading excessive data.

I mention this as I take backups of 5 VMs. One proxy, two www and two SQL database servers 4 times a day and it totals 22~24GB each time. (I only keep 16 backups (so 400GB in total))

I would recommend an on-site backup as well though. Even if it is just an external drive plugged into the proxmox machine. Just so you don't have to wait for the download retrieval of the backup images. And in the grim event of an emergency, you can grab the drive and run. (this isn't a bad thing to have in general)