Proxmox VE Full Course: Class 10 – Backups and Snapshots

Backing up your virtual machines and data is extremely important, yet something that quite a few administrators don’t spend enough time on. In this video, I’ll walk you through the backup and snapshot options that are available within Proxmox.

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  1. Is there an option or way to backup the actual host? I’ve have backups in place for VMs & CTs, I need to do an upgrade, and don’t want to do it without backup up the host first. Thanks

  2. The Proxmox OS is not made to be backed up in its entirety. All you have to back up is /etc for the VM configs and some of the proxmox configs + whatever other files you saved on your system. If you are running using local storage, you might also want to consider backing up the VM disks, but that is optional, they are not affected by the OS upgrade, but by disk corruption.

    Proxmox can then just be reinstalled and you can copy /etc/pve/ onto it, or rather just the qemu or qemu-server folder inside that.

    If you really want to back it up, no matter what, then:

    rsync -avAX --exclude="/dev/*" --exclude="/proc/*" --exclude="/sys/*" --exclude="/tmp/*" --exclude="/run/*" --exclude="/mnt/*" --exclude="/media/*" --exclude="/lost+found" / /mnt/backup-location
    

    But then, you are left with a much more annoying recovery, where you have to copy the data to a newly formatted drive, chroot to the os and reinstall grub. Just reinstalling the system is easier and placing the config files in it.

    Or you could shut it down and use dd or clone-zilla to make a disk image, but if you have it split into multiple partitions on which you keep your vms, this option will also require the space for the entire disk with the VM disks.

  3. Thank you!
    I’ll give this a shot.

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