Tuesday, July 21, 2015

automatic backup with proxmox

This was such a pain in the ass to find... but this is obviously a noob problem.  The steps:


  1. Click the "Datacenter" root of the tree on the left of the UI.  Doesn't matter what view you have selected.  Right where this giant-ass red arrow is pointed:


  1. Next, click the "Backup" tab.  Not sure what else you'd do at this point.  Look for the huge red arrow again:



  1. Now click "Add".  Another enormous arrow points the way:



  1. Now you get a fairly self-explanatory popup for configuring your automatic backups.  No arrows this time :(



  1. Some potential sticking points on the backup form:
    1. If you have no options under "Storage", you need to set up some storage other than the Proxmox boot disk.  Google around for it, I don't have any big-ass arrow-covered guides for that.
    2. The mode you choose matters: 
      1. "Snapshot" is not a real backup - if your VM server's disk craps out and you want to restore from backups, you'll be SOL if you chose snapshots.
      2. "Stop" is the mode I use - while the backup is happening, the VM will not be running, but you get the entire state of the VM into the backup, which makes it a real backup.  On my Xeon E3-1250 (v1 or v2) with several dozen GB disks, this takes an extremely small amount of time, and I'm using the best compression as well.  If you have giant VMs or otherwise really care about performance, you may want to investigate further.
      3. "Suspend" is identical to "Stop" for folks using KVM (VMs).  It differs only for the poor bastards who chose the HD-DVD of virtualization technologies, OpenVZ.  (If you're one of those poor bastards, get out as soon as possible - they're chopping OpenVZ support out of newer versions of Proxmox.  Your pain is my gain, because this allows Proxmox to move away from than ancient 2.6 kernel!)


No comments:

Post a Comment