Ask any tinkerer about the ideal home server platform, and you’ll hear the name Proxmox pop up fairly often in the conversation. Between its LXC support, terrific virtualization performance, cluster capabilities, and low system requirements, Proxmox has a lot of advantages over its rivals. Go deeper into the PVE rabbit hole, and you’ll find an extensive list of features that make Proxmox perfect for advanced home labbers.

Proxmox Backup Server is one such facility, but rather than shipping natively with PVE, PBS is a separate platform designed to help you manage your VM and LXC snapshots. After using Proxmox Backup Server for well over a year, it has become the sole reason why I don’t need to rebuild my home lab from scratch following a botched server experiment.

Why should you bother setting up Proxmox Backup Server?

Deduplication, compression, and incremental backups save disk space

At first glance, a dedicated platform for Proxmox backup tasks may seem overkill, especially since PVE lets you create snapshots for your virtual guests. However, Proxmox Backup Server offers a handful of neat facilities that make it worth the extra hassle.

When you create backups for your LXCs and virtual machines directly on Proxmox, the built-in vzdump utility tends to create huge files every time you schedule the backup operation. This may not be a huge deal if you have a few virtual guests that you back up once in a full moon. But for folks who have dozens of containers and VMs running on a Proxmox node, creating frequent backups will cause your storage drives to fill up in no time.

Luckily, PBS supports incremental backups, where only the changes to your LXC and VM files are sent to the server, to prevent your drives from getting choked by VM and LXC data. It also supports deduplication to reduce the amount of duplicate data occupied by your virtual guests, which can be a godsend when you schedule your backups as often as I do. As if that’s not enough, PBS further compresses all the data using the ZSTD algorithm, and you can create prune jobs to save even more disk space.

Live restore and granular recovery reduce downtime

Besides the extra disk space occupied by vzdump backup files, restoring the virtual guest data can take rather long, especially if you have a habit of stuffing your VMs with tons of packages like I do. PBS supports live restore, which lets you deploy your virtual guests even with the recovery process running in the background.

Better yet, you don’t even have to perform a complete restoration of the entire VM or LXC disk. Since PBS supports granular recovery, you can choose the exact files or directories you wish to restore on your Proxmox guests.

Remote sync adds redundancy to your backups

One of the main tenets of the home lab community is that a single backup is far from reliable – and this rule also applies to your PBS files. Despite all the checksumming, encryption, and other data integrity features of PBS, it’s not a good idea to rely on a single node for your essential VM and container data.

Fortunately, Proxmox Backup Server lets you pair multiple nodes, and you can use sync operations to replicate the backed up files between them. What’s more, you can utilize calendar events to create automated schedules and automate your sync tasks.

Deploying PBS is just as simple

A bare-metal setup is ideal

Proxmox is fairly simple to get up and running, and the same holds true for its backup utility. Since Proxmox Backup Server is available as an ISO file, you can install it the same way as any other distribution. The installation wizard on PBS is pretty similar to the one on Proxmox, and all you have to do is specify a couple of keyboard, location, user account, and network settings before waiting for the installer to do its magic.

Since PBS is a first-party tool, it integrates really well with Proxmox server. Once you’ve created a Datastore with the right disk and filesystem, you can head to the Storage tab within the Datacenter of your PVE node and select Proxmox Backup Server from the Add menu. Then, you can enter the PBS user credentials and fingerprint (which you can copy from its Dashboard) to pair the backup server with your Proxmox node. The next time you create a backup task for your virtual machines and containers, your PBS instance will be visible as a viable location, allowing you to save your virtual guest files directly to it.

But it works well even as a VM

When I first deployed Proxmox Backup Server, I used a bare-metal setup. But in recent times, I’ve experimented with a handful of virtualized PBS instances, which worked surprisingly well.

I once tried to use my NAS in tandem with PBS, though the sheer nightmare called NFS permissions forced me to go for an unorthodox setup, where I deployed PBS on my Proxmox node as a package. While this resulted in longer backup times, it wasn’t that big of a deal, and if things went wrong, I could just reinstall Proxmox, equip this instance with PBS, and point the latter to the right dataset on my NAS to recover my LXCs and VMs.

For my secondary PBS node, I’ve deployed it as a virtual machine on a separate NAS – and it went so well that I immediately switched to this method for my primary Proxmox Backup Server instance.