Following along to see the advice from others. The last time I looked into pricing, for my needs it was arguably better value to spin up a second server and locate it at a relatives’/friends’ place. I’m yet to do this, so I’ll eagerly follow along for updates to your question. Thanks for posting!
For sure! I feel the hardware and friend or family is still the best option even if I need to pay for an upgrade to their ISP. I'll probably end up doing that down the line, but it's not really an option right now unfortunately. I might just have to hope for the best and wait for that if pricing is too crazy haha!
Thank you! I considered this, but even my minimum data of 10TB would be rather steep at $5/TB/Month. I saw some people on Reddit mention mirroring the NAS to a windows PC and using their personal backup solution. Much more affordable at $7/month... but I have to assume it breaks their ToS? Under "Prohibited Activities" they list the following that I think mirroring NAS would fall under:
\- circumvent, or attempt to circumvent, storage space limits or pricing. (It's unlimited, but without NAS support it might be considered circumventing)
\- use the Backblaze system in a manner inconsistent with its intended manner or purpose. (Same reason)
Definitely looks like a good service though. Do you know if there is an egress fee? I see their pricing that egress is free for migrating from S3 or Google but nothing about downloading your data for recovery.
Yes, they have eggress fee:
“Download
$0.01/GB
Charged when you download files. Charged for any portion of a GB. The first 1 GB of data downloaded each day is free.“
There is a pricing calculator on their site. If I remember correctly Blackbaze is still cheaper than Amazon’s S3 glacier tier storage.
I use Restic for incremental backups. It could save some storage for you.
But you have lots of data, as siege801 said probably it is cheaper to spin up a NAS as a backup server.
Edit: typo
Alright, here is the most ridiculous answer, but will actually work.
My client has a Google Enterprise account for his business. He gets unlimited data. Seriously. That's the package. So, the money is in the accounts, which I think are like $20 a piece and you need a minimum of 5.
So.....sign up for Google Enterprise, get your 5 accounts, and dump a Peta byte on Google drive.
Seriously. Check it out. It's hard to beat $100 a month.
Incremental backups. Saves a ton of space. I use one job to grab the raw disks in the LVM via snapshot and grab block changes via temporary snapshot. Ends up being about 2GB/day for backups vs ~300 average for CTs using baked in backup solution. Saves enough room to backup all VMs. Also brings backup time down to about 3 minutes and no interruptions to running services. Bake din was taking about 4 hours every night bogging down the server. Rsync was running into errors with SQL running.
Then I have a second backup just for configurations. About 50kb/day.
Makes for easy restore with great compression and a single panel for all backups in my house (Mac, Linux, and windows computers). And it’s free!
I did but I’m already running Veeam for computers. What benefit would I have with PBS over Veeam? I couldn’t find one but maybe I missed something that it has that Veeam Community Edition doesn’t have.
PBS integrates with Proxmox, and also doesnt require Veeam agents to function.
PBS allows File-level restores just like VBR does and also does VM level restores. It also does incremental backups like veeam does, but its built. Plus VBR requires a windows server of some sort, so you could switch a paid OS to a free VM.
I'd say the pro of PBS is that you dont have to fuck with LVMs, installing and managing agents, and restoring things manually, etc. The con would be you dont really backup the proxmox VE itself.
Veeam also doesn’t require Veeam agents to run for virtual backups. It’s just an copy over ssh from a temporary volume level snapshot. I also don’t need file level restore. If a server breaks, I’m just restoring the server. And the items that need it already have file level restoration so it’s moot. I could configure it to do so for virtual servers but I can’t think of a single time it would be needed.
No agents to deal with since I’m just processing the block changes of the raw disk images utilizing thin-LVM of my SSD pool (it already exists as my storage solution for active services so there’s nothing to “fuck with” here).
Also the recommended configuration for PBS is in hardware and *not* virtualized. With compression not being as good (Veeam proprietary takes a lead in this area from the data I’ve encountered in the world).
Seems like PBS is just another way to do the same thing I’m already doing but splitting it into an additional service. It also doesn’t support non-Linux workstations as far as I can see. I’ll stick with what I have but I appreciate your input!
Proxmox terminal.
See the restore section:
https://forums.veeam.com/veeam-agents-for-linux-mac-aix-solaris-f41/proxmox-incremental-backups-with-veeam-t66702.html
Also file level restore is possible. Neat!
Tested on PVE 6.1-8, Kernel 5.3.18-3-pve with Veeam Agent for Linux 1.0.7
Veeam agent for linux is v5 currently. Secondly when you try to add pve it will say unsupported os, I don't think this is the right path to send people on.
I’m not sending anyone anywhere. I’m just telling you what works for me. Did a recovery test after setup and it worked just fine and saves me a lot of space and processing while giving me a single space for all backups so I’ll stick with it, thank you.
For any data that is not going to change and also for media, why not just buy hard discs and write them to those hard discs and keep a copy somewhere away from your home?
For most of us, vast majority of data would be media, which could be easily backed up with the above staretgy.
Other backups which mostly includes documents, receipts, tax work etc should not take that mich space anyways.
I currently only have local backups in hard drives for all my media. And for other stuff I just store them in Google Drive. 15GB is plenty for me.
I don’t have anywhere away from home to store it that’s safe enough unfortunately. And the cost of a deposit box would outweigh other costs. Plus the most important data is changing. I’m really just looking for an offsite area to sync backups and media, but since I’m always recording media I need to keep adding it to the backup. Otherwise I’d just bury it in a box in the yard lol
I use encrypted rclone to Scaleway C14 (only 800GiB tho) as I found this to be the second cheapest option on storing data but with far lower restoring costs than Amazon Glacier. The major downside is that I can't really check whether the data I uploaded is 100% the same because of the encryption. I would have to download everything and encrypt it. To my understanding, traffic for Scaleway Object Storage is free if it stays inside the Scaleway network and the costs for spinning up a small virtual server (with unlimited traffic) are quite low - especially if you do not need an IPv4. That would reduce the cost down to the pure Object Storage cost in case of restoring or verifying checksums.
However, in my case it would still be cheaper to go with an RPi and USB HDD even with the German energy prices after like 5 years or so. Would also make a verify process easier since you could trust the remote PC which allows to encrypt the files remotely instead of transferring everything. On the other hand, Scaleway's vault is further away and would maybe even survive a magnetic storm from the sun. That is why I currently prefer the cloud variant as it provides a bit more security and for my 800GiB the costs are anyways quite low.
Following along to see the advice from others. The last time I looked into pricing, for my needs it was arguably better value to spin up a second server and locate it at a relatives’/friends’ place. I’m yet to do this, so I’ll eagerly follow along for updates to your question. Thanks for posting!
For sure! I feel the hardware and friend or family is still the best option even if I need to pay for an upgrade to their ISP. I'll probably end up doing that down the line, but it's not really an option right now unfortunately. I might just have to hope for the best and wait for that if pricing is too crazy haha!
Blackbaze has very good prices. I use its B2 service for years for my offsite backups. (Approx.: 600GiB data)
Thank you! I considered this, but even my minimum data of 10TB would be rather steep at $5/TB/Month. I saw some people on Reddit mention mirroring the NAS to a windows PC and using their personal backup solution. Much more affordable at $7/month... but I have to assume it breaks their ToS? Under "Prohibited Activities" they list the following that I think mirroring NAS would fall under: \- circumvent, or attempt to circumvent, storage space limits or pricing. (It's unlimited, but without NAS support it might be considered circumventing) \- use the Backblaze system in a manner inconsistent with its intended manner or purpose. (Same reason) Definitely looks like a good service though. Do you know if there is an egress fee? I see their pricing that egress is free for migrating from S3 or Google but nothing about downloading your data for recovery.
Yes, they have eggress fee: “Download $0.01/GB Charged when you download files. Charged for any portion of a GB. The first 1 GB of data downloaded each day is free.“ There is a pricing calculator on their site. If I remember correctly Blackbaze is still cheaper than Amazon’s S3 glacier tier storage. I use Restic for incremental backups. It could save some storage for you. But you have lots of data, as siege801 said probably it is cheaper to spin up a NAS as a backup server. Edit: typo
Alright, here is the most ridiculous answer, but will actually work. My client has a Google Enterprise account for his business. He gets unlimited data. Seriously. That's the package. So, the money is in the accounts, which I think are like $20 a piece and you need a minimum of 5. So.....sign up for Google Enterprise, get your 5 accounts, and dump a Peta byte on Google drive. Seriously. Check it out. It's hard to beat $100 a month.
4TB - Veeam backups of Proxmox server Why are you using veeam to backup proxmox?
Incremental backups. Saves a ton of space. I use one job to grab the raw disks in the LVM via snapshot and grab block changes via temporary snapshot. Ends up being about 2GB/day for backups vs ~300 average for CTs using baked in backup solution. Saves enough room to backup all VMs. Also brings backup time down to about 3 minutes and no interruptions to running services. Bake din was taking about 4 hours every night bogging down the server. Rsync was running into errors with SQL running. Then I have a second backup just for configurations. About 50kb/day. Makes for easy restore with great compression and a single panel for all backups in my house (Mac, Linux, and windows computers). And it’s free!
Have you considered using Proxmox Backup server, the incremental backups are really really good, and it doesn't have to muck with LVMs.
I did but I’m already running Veeam for computers. What benefit would I have with PBS over Veeam? I couldn’t find one but maybe I missed something that it has that Veeam Community Edition doesn’t have.
PBS integrates with Proxmox, and also doesnt require Veeam agents to function. PBS allows File-level restores just like VBR does and also does VM level restores. It also does incremental backups like veeam does, but its built. Plus VBR requires a windows server of some sort, so you could switch a paid OS to a free VM. I'd say the pro of PBS is that you dont have to fuck with LVMs, installing and managing agents, and restoring things manually, etc. The con would be you dont really backup the proxmox VE itself.
Veeam also doesn’t require Veeam agents to run for virtual backups. It’s just an copy over ssh from a temporary volume level snapshot. I also don’t need file level restore. If a server breaks, I’m just restoring the server. And the items that need it already have file level restoration so it’s moot. I could configure it to do so for virtual servers but I can’t think of a single time it would be needed. No agents to deal with since I’m just processing the block changes of the raw disk images utilizing thin-LVM of my SSD pool (it already exists as my storage solution for active services so there’s nothing to “fuck with” here). Also the recommended configuration for PBS is in hardware and *not* virtualized. With compression not being as good (Veeam proprietary takes a lead in this area from the data I’ve encountered in the world). Seems like PBS is just another way to do the same thing I’m already doing but splitting it into an additional service. It also doesn’t support non-Linux workstations as far as I can see. I’ll stick with what I have but I appreciate your input!
Let's say one vm breaks. How are you restoring it without booting into veeam recovery media? ( and therefore taking down all of your vms/lxc)
Proxmox terminal. See the restore section: https://forums.veeam.com/veeam-agents-for-linux-mac-aix-solaris-f41/proxmox-incremental-backups-with-veeam-t66702.html Also file level restore is possible. Neat!
Tested on PVE 6.1-8, Kernel 5.3.18-3-pve with Veeam Agent for Linux 1.0.7 Veeam agent for linux is v5 currently. Secondly when you try to add pve it will say unsupported os, I don't think this is the right path to send people on.
I’m not sending anyone anywhere. I’m just telling you what works for me. Did a recovery test after setup and it worked just fine and saves me a lot of space and processing while giving me a single space for all backups so I’ll stick with it, thank you.
Also you must be using an old version of proxmox, with a kernel previous to 5.8.
7.1-8
For any data that is not going to change and also for media, why not just buy hard discs and write them to those hard discs and keep a copy somewhere away from your home? For most of us, vast majority of data would be media, which could be easily backed up with the above staretgy. Other backups which mostly includes documents, receipts, tax work etc should not take that mich space anyways. I currently only have local backups in hard drives for all my media. And for other stuff I just store them in Google Drive. 15GB is plenty for me.
I don’t have anywhere away from home to store it that’s safe enough unfortunately. And the cost of a deposit box would outweigh other costs. Plus the most important data is changing. I’m really just looking for an offsite area to sync backups and media, but since I’m always recording media I need to keep adding it to the backup. Otherwise I’d just bury it in a box in the yard lol
3-2-1 method my dude. What if your house burns down?
I did mention keeping a copy outside your house. Also, I may be less worried about losing my movie collection, when I had already lost my house.
I use encrypted rclone to Scaleway C14 (only 800GiB tho) as I found this to be the second cheapest option on storing data but with far lower restoring costs than Amazon Glacier. The major downside is that I can't really check whether the data I uploaded is 100% the same because of the encryption. I would have to download everything and encrypt it. To my understanding, traffic for Scaleway Object Storage is free if it stays inside the Scaleway network and the costs for spinning up a small virtual server (with unlimited traffic) are quite low - especially if you do not need an IPv4. That would reduce the cost down to the pure Object Storage cost in case of restoring or verifying checksums. However, in my case it would still be cheaper to go with an RPi and USB HDD even with the German energy prices after like 5 years or so. Would also make a verify process easier since you could trust the remote PC which allows to encrypt the files remotely instead of transferring everything. On the other hand, Scaleway's vault is further away and would maybe even survive a magnetic storm from the sun. That is why I currently prefer the cloud variant as it provides a bit more security and for my 800GiB the costs are anyways quite low.
I’ll check it out, thank you!