I have a confession to make.
I’ve been working in IT for about 6/7 years now and I’ve been selfhosting for about 5. And in all this time, in my work environment or at home, I’ve never bothered about backups. I know they are essential for every IT network, but I never cared to learn it. Just a few copies of some harddisks here and there and that is actually all I know. I’ve tried a few times, but I’ve often thought the learning curve to steep, or the commandline gave me some errors I didn’t want to troubleshoot.
It is time to make a change. I’m looking for an easy to learn backup solution for my home network. I’m running a Proxmox server with about 8 VMs on it, including a NAS full of photos and a mediaserver with lots of movies and shows. It has 2x 8TB disks in a RAID1 set. Next to that I’ve got 2 windows laptops and a linux desktop.
What could be a good backup solution that is also easy to learn?
I’ve tried Borg, but I couldn’t figure out all the commandline options. I’m leaning towards Proxmox Backup Server, but I don’t know if it works well with something other than my Proxmox server. I’ve also thought about Veeam since I encounter it sometimes at work, but the free version supports only up to 10 devices.
My plan now is to create 2 backup servers, 1 onsite, running on something like a raspberry pi or an HP elitedesk. The other would be an HP microserver N40L, which I can store offsite.
What could be the perfect backup solution for me?
EDIT:
After a few replies I feel the need to mention that I’m looking for a free and centrally managed option. Thanks!
I’m running Urbackup, runs on my thin client server and backups all windows machines and itself. But is actually seems quite unreliable.
I use rclone and the gui https://rclone.org/gui/ in my proxmox environment.
That said, the backup itself is still initiated via batch script.
Edit: to backup my PC and all smartphones to my server I use syncthing.
And the rclone backs the data to an cloud system. Some parts encrypted
I use rclone as well and was in your position not long ago (looking for a non complicated backup solution). Landed on rclone based on feedback and what I read online. Spent about an hour reading rcl one’s documentation and built a script to do the backups daily.
OP if you go the rclone route, I can share my template script with you to get you started.
The script is pretty simple: makes sure there’s a logging file created on the system ahead of time, timestamps, the actual backup job, error checking, notification via discord (success or failure) and log output to the file created above.
Edit: I forgot to mention that recently (don’t know exactly when) Proxmox released something call Proxmox Backup Server (PBS). I have not used it but I imagine it integrates well with your Proxmox cluster but even then you may want to look at a complimentary solution to backup that server too.
Edit: Even if you go with Proxmox Backup Server, you may want to thinking about how you backup the backup server. Preferably off site, in my opinion.
Maybe Kopia is what you are looking for? It’s opensource and has a GUI:
“Cross-platform backup tool for Windows, macOS & Linux with fast, incremental backups, client-side end-to-end encryption, compression and data deduplication. CLI and GUI included.”
You could do pull based backups with a central kopia instance and remote machines as described here: https://github.com/kopia/kopia/issues/1636#issuecomment-1596279322
I can’t speak for Proxmox specifically, but Duplicacy works great on my unRAID box and has a fully built out GUI. One of the best solutions I’ve found for my uses so far.
