So what is the best way to setup a single pve so that we can backup and restore the os. I have not been able to backup and restore using clonezilla. Maybe the proxmox backup server ? Any ideas and answers will be appreciated

Thanks
Ronney

So I shutdown the machine and used dd to backup the boot drive and it worked with ext4 filesystem and lvm - I deleted the partitions on the original drive with gparted, dd'd the disk back to it's original spot, rebooted and everything is hunky dory... so I guess for now that's the trick...

So what is the best way to setup a single pve so that we can backup and restore the os. I have not been able to backup and restore using clonezilla. Maybe the proxmox backup server ? Any ideas and answers will be appreciated

Thanks
Ronney

@black3dynamite - going there no - will try it and see how it works

@JaredBusch Thanks Jared - the snapshot issue is ow clear in my mind

I've been poking around with proxmox for the last few days and have had some success with the backup and restore process. My setup is simple. Dell T320 this hardware raid, a 2tb raid one set, 16 gig of ram running proxmox 6.2 with community subscription. Created a Server 16 guest on a 32 Gig boot drive using the local-lvm storage option , tested and works fine. Subsequently added a second virtual disk for data, also using the local-lvm option. Added some data and began backing up to a samba share running on a separate physical machine. The backup went well, as well as the subsequent restore.

But along the way things got weird.

In setting up the backup job the choices for mode are snapshot, suspend, and stop. The snapshot mode confused me because the term snapshot is also used to create what I will call a 'state' snapshot rather than a 'real' backup. In this case I thought that the snapshot mode of a backup would create an incremental backup - but it did not. I wound up with another full backup.

The test vm just described has a total of 70 gig disk space on the two drives and the backup process takes about 17 minutes on my current hardware. So does the restore process. BUT, my goal is to backup a server that has 1.4 TB of data and also have a maximum recovery time of 4 hours. . I suspect that the full backup and restore process for a data set this large will not meet the recovery objective.

So here I sit, trying to find a way to create incremental backups from the proxmox web gui or using a third party tool. In the meanwhile one thought I have is create a periodic backup of the boot drive from the proxmox gui, and then have another process run from within the vm to make full and incremental backups of the data.

So how are other Proxmox users managing their backup and recovery.