I have a confession to make.
I’ve been working in IT for about 6/7 years now and I’ve been selfhosting for about 5. And in all this time, in my work environment or at home, I’ve never bothered about backups. I know they are essential for every IT network, but I never cared to learn it. Just a few copies of some harddisks here and there and that is actually all I know. I’ve tried a few times, but I’ve often thought the learning curve to steep, or the commandline gave me some errors I didn’t want to troubleshoot.
It is time to make a change. I’m looking for an easy to learn backup solution for my home network. I’m running a Proxmox server with about 8 VMs on it, including a NAS full of photos and a mediaserver with lots of movies and shows. It has 2x 8TB disks in a RAID1 set. Next to that I’ve got 2 windows laptops and a linux desktop.
What could be a good backup solution that is also easy to learn?
I’ve tried Borg, but I couldn’t figure out all the commandline options. I’m leaning towards Proxmox Backup Server, but I don’t know if it works well with something other than my Proxmox server. I’ve also thought about Veeam since I encounter it sometimes at work, but the free version supports only up to 10 devices.
My plan now is to create 2 backup servers, 1 onsite, running on something like a raspberry pi or an HP elitedesk. The other would be an HP microserver N40L, which I can store offsite.
What could be the perfect backup solution for me?
EDIT:
After a few replies I feel the need to mention that I’m looking for a free and centrally managed option. Thanks!
Free and centrally managed, not aware of any but definitely interested in something like that too.
My current setup has Proxmox backing up all LXC and VMs to Synology NAS then the Synology NAS backing up to Backblaze. Both run nightly. Using the built-in backup utility on Proxmox VE pointed at CIFS share on the Synology NAS.
Synology does have a software backup client available but I have never used it. For my desktops & laptops, they are easily reinstalled+reconfigured, I just make sure the data I care about is stored or synchronized to my NAS or the cloud. Nextcloud for files, Firefox sync for history+bookmarks, bitwarden client+vaultwarden for passwords, chezmoi for some dotfiles on some linux systems.
Synology’s ActiveBackup surprised me in it’s quality for being essentially a “”““free””“” (*bundles with hardware) solution. In total it’s saved my bacon about 4-6 times already, twice for a desktop death, two restores of my PDC, one semi-successful save of my DHCP server (it’s eventual death was not ABB’s fault), and one BMR simply to upgrade the disk of a laptop. (Before you ask, yes I do have two AD DCs for homelab). All in all it’s a lovely product, but doesn’t fit the bill as a F/OSS backup system so I don’t feel it deserves a root comment in this thread. I myself have been looking for an OSS solution similar to OP, not because I dislike my ABB deployment, but because I don’t want to be beholden to Synology forever. (they annoyed me s touch over the announcement of drive firmware lock in, and I do want to build my own NAS someday)
My RPO for critical assets (vCenter, AD, NAS, Unifi controller) and my personal desktops is 24h, and RTO of whenever I get to it - but the software itself is pretty fast once engaged (but not wire rate). Non critical assets are backed up on Sunday night. Schedules for both critical and non critical are staggered out along with interleaving with my Syno NAS’s self-backups to USB and Backblaze. If I remember correctly, there is a “max running tasks” gate in ABB, but don’t quote me on that.
Most of my infra is ESX (vSAN, iSCSI, local disk), so the majority of my backups are done using the snapshot-based VM backup feature. This goes pretty smooth and has a pretty fine grained retention schedule, so I’m happy. As a snapshot backup, you can’t restore just one file, you have to restore the VM as a whole.
My other two NAS (the VMs I run TrueNAS and Nextcloud on respectively) use the file server rsync backup method. The latter is Linux and I tried the native Linux agent a while back, but I remember running into a kernel version issue since it would have to install a snapshot driver. I stopped messing with the native Linux agent at that point because I’ve seen what happens to XFS when you run a version of Acronis that doesn’t match the kernel version (it doesn’t end well for your data). Admittedly, that was the first major release of ABB for Linux, so some stuff may have changed in the intermediate. There will come a day when I need to back up a native Linux hardware box, and that day I will also select my distro as much as possible with a matching kernel release to ABB.
Windows native agent is nearly invisible and runs great. MacOS (fingers crossed) I’ve never had to restore from , but my low-use Mac is connected and does show it’s jobs regularly running (and yes, I know it doesn’t exist unless it’s tested :P )
My last NAS & ESXi box were 12 years old when I retired them. I had thought about sticking with used enterprise gear but wanted a break to be a little lazy for a couple years. Storage is on Synology (DS1520+) and Proxmox runs on Asus PN63-S1 mini PC. Hyper Backup was primary reason I chose Synology (always been lazy about off-site backups) and docker feature has come in handy for things like secondary pihole & DNS. LXC with docker or podman have been able to cover majority of my needs in proxmox but still have Home Assistant & Unifi Network Controller on their own VMs. Home Assistant I have zero plans to move. Unifi I eventually plan to move over to docker but it works for now, albeit on an older version. Really need to up my documentation & diagram game, it’s all a huge mess, lol.
Future plans would love to have closet full of used enterprise servers running proxmox with all flash ceph storage backend then can do whatever NAS distro I want as a VM. My budget is focused elsewhere for next year or two unfortunately so gonna be awhile unless something breaks.
Always like to hear about other setups as I am constantly re-thinking my own.