Proxmox has a pretty good backup scheduler, but it relies on the backup destination being mounted as a storage location. This implies that the backup destination needs to be a protocol that Proxmox supports - SMB (CIFS), NFS, … or Proxmox Backup Server. If you want to push your backups to a cloud service, you probably need something a bit more complicated. Thankfully, Proxmox’s backup scheduler thought about this and has a hook feature we can use for this purpose, and we can use any protocol supported on the Debian base system, including things such as FUSE or s3cmd.

As I outlined in my first blog post on the topic, I want to build a new backup server, and I want to explore the different options I have. This project included a lot of testing, and will eventually culminate in actually building and setting up a proper backup system. It’s definitely an important and often overlooked part of a homelab, or even small business networks. Ideally, I can also get a functional offsite backup working, but that might be a future project.

As part of my series exploring backup options, I’m exploring the options for pulling a backup of a Proxmox Virtual Environment (PVE) host to TrueNAS SCALE server. In this case, PVE host has local ZFS storage, and the TrueNAS system is acting as the backup server. Ideally, PVE would snapshot in ZFS and we could sync those snapshots with a TrueNAS Data Replication task, but PVE doesn’t use the ZFS snapshot features by default.

As part of my series exploring backup options, I’d like to see if I can use Proxmox Backup Server to archive both datasets and zvols of a TrueNAS SCALE server. Why would you want to do this? In my case, I’m trying to choose the best starting point for my new backup server, and one potential option is to use Proxmox Backup Server (PBS), but I’d like to store data outside of the Proxmox Virtual Environment (PVE) ecosystem.

I’m working on the next revision of my homelab backend. Currently I rely on an Ubuntu server with ZFS on Linux for file storage over Samba, and a separate Proxmox Virtualization Environment (PVE) server (the Minilab) with local LVM storage for virtualization. Ideally, I’d like to add a backup server to the mix, with its own storage, that can handle both the Proxmox server and Samba shares. However, the big choice ahead is what software to use for backups - TrueNAS (CORE or SCALE), or the newer Proxmox Backup Server (PBS)?

As I’ve posted about in other blogs, I use OPNsense as the firewall for my home network. It has an inbuilt method of backing up its configuration to the cloud, but I’d like to avoid that and back up locally. Unfortunately, there isn’t a plugin in the repository to have the firewall push a backup to a samba share, so I need to run code somewhere to pull the configuration from the firewall and store it on the storage server (where the backup policies will take care of it).

Inspired by recent a recent video on the basics of PXE booting by ‘Tall Paul Tech’ (formerly known as CWNE88), as well as a comment by Linus of Linus Tech Tips that his new home server could ’network boot everything in his house’, I wondered how easy it would be to network boot everything in my house. In an ideal world, this would solve a lot of problems regarding managing backups of the drives - by simply not having drives at any client, they can all be managed and backed up centrally by the server.

After my scare with the Z-wave controller dying due to SD card failure (See the blog post), I decided that my Zigbee network is important enough to back up, especially because a whole lot more important data is stored on disk rather than in the dongle as with Z-wave. I’m going to follow the same path I took in the Z-wave blog, but for Zigbee2MQTT. Since it’s running ‘bare’ on a raspberry pi, I can’t just backup the whole virtual machine.

As mentioned in my last blog post, I setup an autofs share to mount my NAS for backups. Since I’ve always used fstab in the past to mount this, and it’s quite unreliable for cifs shares, and some internet articles go into way more detail than necessary on setting up autofs, here’s a very quick overview on setting up samba / CIFS shares with autofs on Raspberry Pi OS (or any other Debian / Ubuntu based system).

I got my Z-Wave Raspberry Pi setup a few weeks ago, and then spent a ton of time setting up my Bedroom Lights, Bathroom Fan+Light, and ordered even more Z-wave hardware. I also started up an RTL-433 server for a yet unfinished project, and about a week later, Home Assistant suddenly reported all of my Z-wave devices offline. Home Assistant was unable to connect to the WebSocket of ZWaveJS. The Pi was acting really weird.