So, I’ve been pushing my photos to local immich-instance and I’ll need some kind of file storage too soon, total amount of data is roughly 1,5TB.
Everything is running on a proxmox server and that’s running somewhat smoothly, but now I’d need to get that backed up offsite. I’m running a VPS at Hetzner and they offer pretty decently priced S3 storage or ‘storagebox’ which is just a raw disk you can connect via SMB/NFS and others.
Now, the question is, how to set up automated backups from proxmox to either of those solutions? I suppose I could just mount anything to the host locally and set up backup paths accordingly, but should the mount drop for whatever reason is proxmox smart enough to notice that actual storage is missing and not fill small local drive with backups?
Encryption would be nice too, but that might be a bit too much to ask. I have enough bandwidth to manage everything and after initial upload the data doesn’t change that much, the only question is what is the best practise to do it?
The most efficient option is probably Restic inside each VM/CT, because you pick exactly what you need to backup instead of the entire OS.
If you use any kind of deduplication and or compression, the system files do not amount to any meaningful size (assuming there is no additional encryption on the VM disks). Especially when you consider the size of OPs data, 1,5TB, then the couple of GB of system binaries etc. do not really matter.
You are absolutely correct. I don’t mind the few GB’s worth of data for the operating system, a single video with my drone is likely more than that and it’s not something you can deduplicate nor compress very well. If I really wanted I think it should be possible to squeeze the operating system at least below 2GB, but it’s just not worth the effort. I just want that the memories over 20+ years I have on the thing to remain.
I am fully backing up my Mail Server with some exclusions like /tmp etc. with restic now for over a year, including updated binaries and docker images etc. and have about 16GB of data with hourly backups for over a year.
True, sometimes there are other files though. For example my Minecraft server I backup the world but not the web map files, since those are over 30GB and can be regenerated.