This guide is a part of a series on Proxmox for Homelabs. You can find the Series Overview here.

In this guide I'll cover my backup strategy for Proxmox containers and data, as well as how to run a restore.

Backup Overview

A good goal for a backup system is to implement the 3-2-1 Backup Strategy

The 3-2-1 backup rule is a simple, effective data backup strategy for keeping your data safe. It advises that you keep three copies of your data on two different media with one copy off-site

I'm not quite going to get there for everything because I'm trying to control spending on my homelab, but I will highlight the areas I am falling short and how you might get there yourself. There is some argument about whether one of the "copies" of the data is the production instance, but in this case I am going to count it. If you perform a backup of a container you have two copies: the container itself, and the backup image; an off-site backup of the backup image makes 3.

I'm interested in backing up 3 kinds of data, and they will each be handled slightly differently.

The containers (LXC and Docker). Their configuration and data. I want to be able to restore them onto a fresh Proxmox install without skipping a beat.
My NAS data. This is everything in my ZFS pool that is my data: notes, photos, personal backup (e.g. game saves), 3d Prints.
Media. This is everything in my ZFS pool that is not my data. 🏴‍☠️

Pre-requisites

Proxmox, obviously
Resticprofile installed
A remote repository for restic (I am using BorgBase, but there are many options)

Container Backup Strategy

If you followed along in the (ZFS mounts)[/proxmox-zfs-mounts] and (Servarr stack)[/proxmox-servarr-stack] guide you should have a ZFS dataset for app_configs. This lives on the ZFS Pool and is used directly by the respective Docker container. I extend this pattern to all Docker containers that I need persistent configuration for, not just the Servarr stack. This includes syncthing, scrypted, and the dedicated game servers that I run.

For the LXC containers I'm using a weekly backup schedule to a new ZFS dataset /tank/container-backups. This will be backed up by restic to Borgbase, fulfilling the 3-2-1 requirements.

Creating the Proxmox Backup Schedule

In the Proxmox Web UI go to Datacenter -> Backup
Click Add
Create a schedule that includes the containers you want to backup (which may not be all of them)
(Optional) Setup retention. I am using 1, because restic will keep the last 3 and I don't want to multiply these snapshots.
Run the Backup Schedule with Run now to get an initial snapshot to work with

Configuring Resticprofile

Resticprofile uses yaml for configuration.

This is my profiles.yaml

version: "1"

default:
  # this is hard-coded in conf, but its secret so I've taken it out
  repository: "rest:https://SECRET_REPO_ID.repo.borgbase.com" 
  password-file: "~/restic-password"

  backup:
    verbose: true
    source:
      - "/tank/container-backups/dump"
      - "/tank/nas"
      - "/tank/apps"
      - "/tank/media_root/media/music"
    schedule: "Mon, 04:00"
  retention:
    group-by: ""
    before-backup: false
    after-backup: true
    keep-last: 3
    prune: true
    tag: true
    host: true

I create this and the restic-password file containing my borgbase repo password in the proxmox root user's home directory.

Once it exists running resticprofile backup once will create the initial backup and start the schedule to run it periodically.

Backup up Media

You'll notice that I am not backing up everything in /tank/media_root, just the music. Here is where my cost control is factoring in: I want to stay in borgbase's cheap tier. I can do this by keeping everything under 20GB, and right now that covers everything above. I have Terabytes of other media that I am OK with losing, because it can be re-downloaded. So I don't back it up. If you want to do that, update the source to include all of your media.

Restoring

If you suffer a system drive failure you can recover your Proxmox containers like this

Install proxmox, including resticprofile (this is manual)
Import the ZFS pool: zpool import tank
Add the ZFS pool as Proxmox storage: pvesm add dir tank-backup --path /tank/proxmox-backup --content backup,vztmpl,iso
Restore the files from the latest snapshot

resticprofile restore latest:/tank/container-backups/dump --target="/tank/container-backups/dump"

Restore the snapshots by going to tank-backups in the Proxmox Server View, selecting the image, and clicking Restore

If you need the ZFS Mounts and GPU passthrough for your containers, go through those steps again. I have these done through ansible, so they are part of my proxmox install, but they are relatively quick as manual steps.

Proxmox Storing from Backup