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reddit.com › r/proxmox › how long before deduplication on pbs kicks in?

r/Proxmox on Reddit: How long before deduplication on PBS kicks in?

September 29, 2023 -

I just started a pbs server to check out how it works. I have 8 vm's at 50GB each, and each has 5 snapshots. Each snapshot appears to be the full 50GB and the dashboard is giving me a dedupe factor of 1. I have the backup retention set to last 14. How long before I should see the deduplication saving space?

Run a garbage collection. After that you see the dedup in Datastores => Your Datastore Or Just read it at the last 5-10 Lines of the Garbage collect logs. For me its from 6 TB Data to 800 GB on disk And its activated by default

Deduplication in PBS is managed externally, much like in Seafile. This means that the underlying file system used for PBS storage doesn't need to support deduplication. In fact, enabling deduplication at the file system level would be redundant and could waste resources.

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reddit.com › r/proxmox › what affects dedupe factor on pbs backups??

r/Proxmox on Reddit: What affects dedupe factor on PBS backups??

July 5, 2025 -

Just got this up and running yesterday. Set it for daily backups. It did the first full backup and this morning did the first incremental. Shows only a value of 3.04. TechnoTim had a value like 64. Not sure what he was doing for that but I do think he was doing like hourly backups so that maybe is why. Anyhow just curious what things I could do to possibly increase this value?

On that note, does the garbage collection schedule make any difference? Right now I am doing on PBS pruning for 7 dailys and 2 weeklys (pve job retention is off) and garbage collection every 6hrs. Not sure if this impacts anything but wanted to mention.

I guess what is odd (more with the incremental aspect). I haven't changed a single thing on any of my 10 CTs yet it got an incremental backup and took an hour. Still better than the almost 3hrs it too for a full backup but confused why it was so much if it's just the difference. Since nothing changes shouldn't it be close to nothing?

> The deduplication of datastores is based on reusing chunks, which are referenced by the indexes in a backup snapshot. This means that multiple indexes can reference the same chunks, reducing the amount of space needed to contain the data (even across backup snapshots). https://pbs.proxmox.com/docs/technical-overview.html#datastores If you want to understand the in and outs behind the curtain I suggest reading the technical docs, they are great to understand everything

depuplication allows for only one copy of a file to be backed up when the might be might multiple copies across many backups. So if you've got 5 x Windows 11 VMs, 3 x Ubuntu 25.10, 3 x Debian 12 you've gonna have a high depub factor because there will be lots of files common to each so only it only needs to be backup once. On the otherhand if you 2 x Win 11, 1 x Win10, 1 x Win Server, 2 x Ubuntu 25.10, 1 x Debian 12, 1 x Arch you're going to be much lower on the dedupe cos there's not as many common files. When you run a garbage collection, the file aren't actually deleted for another 24hrs by default. There's a setting you can change that was mentioned in here recently, that I changed on my PBS but damned it I can remember where it was :(

reddit.com › r/proxmox › pbs deduplication zfs only?

r/Proxmox on Reddit: PBS deduplication zfs only?

June 8, 2022 -

Hi,

so im currently testing the proxmox backup server für my vms. I was wondering if the deduplication / dirtybit only works with zfs or if it also works on "normal" ext4 formated disks (mounted directory).

Best

The normal mode of operation for PBS is to run on the hypervisor host and carry out a block-level backup of the VM/LXC virtual disks. Since it's a block level backup the filesystem on the virtual disk is irrelevant at the time it is captured. However a key feature of PBS is that you can browse and extract individual files. That's only going to be possible if the PBS server can read the filesystem inside the backup. The backups created by PBS are de-duplicated. ZFS provides for de-duplication of the primary storage (i.e. where the live vmdk lives when the VM is running). Also, as Qemu is able to track the dirt blocks, when PBS creates a VM backup, it only needs to read/write the blocks changed since the last backup. This does not work for lxc's - where PBS creates an image of the whole device then compares this with the most recent backup to get the changed blocks. There's also proxmox-backup-client which reads the local devices and sends them to a PBS server. I've not used this myself, but I believe it is currently only available for Linux and in the absence of a mechanism for tracking dirty blocks, will behave similarly to an LXC backup. But since the host where the backup client is running cannot be quiesced you'd be looking at crash-recovery on restore.

As far as I know yes, ZFS dedup is a part from the ZFS FS so it makes sense, the entire server is build for you to use ZFS

reddit.com › r/proxmox › zfs deduplication of pve backups?

r/Proxmox on Reddit: ZFS deduplication of PVE backups?

November 11, 2024 -

I'm using Proxmox at home to host the usual things. One ZFS NVMe pool for all the containers/VMs and one ZFS HDD pool for nightly backups.

I just setup a second PC with TrueNAS for some "just in case" backups of the backups (from PVE and other sources around the house).

Each VM has 1-2 dozen nearly identical backups, so I decided to try ZFS' deduplication feature. I copied over backups for 4 VMs (500G total) and was shocked to see no gains/efficiency from the deduplication, not even 1.01!

Some of those backups are from a VM that was powered off, so the original disk was definitely unchanged. Shouldn't the resulting backups be bit-identical? Does anyone know if Proxmox includes some metadata that might spoil block-level deduplication?

Get rid of TrueNAS and use Proxmox Backup Server instead. I've never had decent results with ZFS deduplication. The PBS dedup feature works allot better. It's also allot faster because it only needs to backup changed data from the last backup. And I'll probably get booted out of this sub for saying this but Synology ABB for everything else. PBS only supports Proxmox and Debian clients. I've looked at other backup solutions both commercial and open source and I ended up getting a small Synology NAS instead. Dedup and compression works decent in ABB and no licensing costs per machine. (If you really want the free option, UrBackup also supports deduplication/incremental-forever and has clients for most OS.)

Not sure how regular backups are deduped (or if they are at all) and I have never seen much dedupe happening on ZFS (though I’ve never really looked into it and haven’t cared). But I can tell you, check out Proxmox Backup Server, which is Proxmox’s official backup solution that’s a huge step up and has absolutely crazy dedupe, incremental backups, etc. still free, just runs in a VM or LXC.

reddit.com › r/proxmox › proxmox backup server and dedup

r/Proxmox on Reddit: Proxmox Backup Server and dedup

August 10, 2025 -

I am in the process of migrating from Veeam to PBS, and there are some differences but it all seems managable for my scenario.

One detail I can't seem to find clarified, that maybe someone in here knows: dedup on PBS, is that across a single VM's backups, across whole datastores, or globally?

deduplication is done on the datastore level. Each datastore has it's own chunk-store in .chunks/.

regarding dedup: after you run Garbage Collection, there's also info about the deduplication factor in the Datastore Summary

reddit.com › r/proxmox › what wizardry is this? i'm just blown away.

r/Proxmox on Reddit: What wizardry is this? I'm just blown away.

March 8, 2024 - PBS runs circles around it. ... The way it dedups is to only keep one copy of each bit and use pointers every time its the same, correct? If true, doesn't this add risk?

reddit.com › r/proxmox › correlation of zfs dedup, compression and proxmox backup server

r/Proxmox on Reddit: Correlation of ZFS dedup, compression and Proxmox Backup Server

November 18, 2020 -

Today I played around with some settings in ZFS and Proxmox Backup Server. I use Proxmox Backup Server with a ZFS raidz2 as storage for the Backup space. The ZFS pool was created manually without the proxmox-backup-manager command.

I noticed that the WebUI shows a deduplication factor of (in my case) 94.02 but the zfs pool shows dedupratio 1.00x.

Does Proxmox Backup Server not use ZFS' deduplication functionality? Should I enable deduplication and compression in the ZFS pool? Which compression algorithm should I use?

EDIT: I have tested a bit with ZFS and Proxmox Backup Server for quite a while (both hardware and VMs) and ZFS' deduplication and compression have next to 0 gains. As pointed out by the comments deduplication does not make sense as Proxmox stores backups in binary chunks (mostly of 4MiB) and does the deduplication and most of the compression there. ZFS compression with zstd-12 ended up on a compressratio of 1.02x which is not very significant.

TL;DR It's not necessary to use ZFS compression or deduplication because it's both already handled by Proxmox's way of storing Archives and Block Devices.

I believe they do not use zfs's dedup functionality. It seems they have created their own file format, Proxmox File Archive (.pxar). So they handle deduplication and compression and data transport themselves. ZFS isn't a requirement for datastores. You can create datastores on ext4 for example. They store data at the file level, not block.

So, I would turn off compression because it's probably extraneous for achieves which are already compressed.

PBS only dedups on a per group (container/vm/host) basis. So you will have some data duplicated across groups. So enabling ZFS deduplication may help a little by deduping the whole datastore instead of each individual group. I don't know if it's worth it though, you'll have to test/decide for yourself.

ETA: a word

The PBS does not use ZFS deduplication. PBS dedupe works similar to Windows offline Dedupe. PBS does it on the fly instead of as a scan process like Windows. But with both, files and blocks are broken up into chunks and stored in a chunk store. The chunks are hashed and matching hashes are used to dedupe.

reddit.com › r/proxmox › pbs backups from several pve hosts using same vmid

r/Proxmox on Reddit: PBS backups from several PVE hosts using same VMID

March 18, 2024 -

I took over the mgt of 6 different hosts and a PBS. The PVE hosts are not in a cluster so standalone and I have a suspicion that, because of the fact that vmids are reused on multiple hosts, backups are not lining up well and might be overwritten or unavailable for restoring.

So my question is: should I always use unique vmids for my vms to keep backups healthy?

If you have to use the same id of multiple standalone hosts (for whatever reason) you can seperate the backups via namespaces on the PBS. Another option i use (in addition to namespaces) is to prepend my vmids with an identifier id of my host. e.g. i have a host with the name pve09. the vmid prefix for all my vms would be 09 which results in 9101 for example (the leading 0 is lost)

as a part of the backup job you can create a note per backup that can dynamically take clarifying info https://pve.proxmox.com/pve-docs/chapter-vzdump.html#vzdump_notes Backup Notes You can add notes to backups using the Edit Notes button in the UI or via the storage content API. It is also possible to specify a template for generating notes dynamically for a backup job and for manual backup. The template string can contain variables, surrounded by two curly braces, which will be replaced by the corresponding value when the backup is executed. Currently supported are: {{cluster}} the cluster name, if any {{guestname}} the virtual guest’s assigned name {{node}} the host name of the node the backup is being created {{vmid}} the numerical VMID of the guest When specified via API or CLI, it needs to be a single line, where newline and backslash need to be escaped as literal \n and \\ respectively. in my clusters I use dailyStop - {{cluster}} - {{node}} - {{vmid}} - {{guestname}} twoHourlySnapshot - {{cluster}} - {{node}} - {{vmid}} - {{guestname}} to denote backup type and info where there may be overlapping vmids within the same cluster namespace as I also blow away and rebuild stuff frequently. I may need to look into separate node namespaces. By automating the details in the notes, I have 5 backup jobs for a 4 node cluster instead of a huge list. 1 staggered per node (on 15m centers between 0200 and 0245) daily full stop job, and one every 2hr on the hour snapshot job that covers all nodes. Also I need a long short term memory, e.g. retention policy, but a short longterm memory in backup for those that get blown away recently and need to be restored. I keep the last 1, 12 hourly, 7 daily, 4 weekly, 12 monthly and 1 yearly. use https://pbs.proxmox.com/docs/prune-simulator/ to see your prune schedule on a calendar. There's a search in PBS content which helps as I use a service descriptive name for my nodes in PVE and a fun name in the guest. So in the last 24hr I have 13 backups but total for a year I have 37 backups total per vmid in each namespace. Even with all that my utilization is super tiny: Usage 5.89% (341.91 GB of 5.80 TB) Backup Count CT 15 Groups, 204 Snapshots Host 0 Groups, 0 Snapshots VM 131 Groups, 1674 Snapshots Stats from last Garbage Collection Deduplication Factor 113.90 The one thing I think I'm missing is an off PBS backup in case there's a PBS issue. I think I'll set up a VM in my NAS and do a sync job to a PBS instance w/ datastore there. This setup has saved my bacon more than once. PBS is my favorite PVE accessory. It's a super duper!

reddit.com › r/proxmox › pbs deduplication of incoming backups

r/Proxmox on Reddit: PBS Deduplication of incoming backups

September 8, 2023 -

Hi everyone,

my datastore is at about 40% usage after deduplication. When I run a new backup however, it quickly fills the whole datastore and the following backups fail.

After making some space I’ve run an Garbage collection which worked last time since the backups failed a few days ago. Situation released the following night and now the GC only marks the chunks as „pending removals“. On the Proxmox Forum a staff member mentioned, that new backups are protected 24h from GC, so that they are save while still being written.

How do I set this up, so that my datastore doesn’t blow up every time I run the backup?

Add more space to your datastore or change the frequency and schedule of your backups so that you're not backing up everything all at one time.

reddit.com › r/proxmox › proxmox backup server datastore deduplication factor math?

r/Proxmox on Reddit: Proxmox Backup Server datastore deduplication factor math?

September 26, 2022 -

So I've put Proxmox Backup Server into production in my org as we move over to PVE from Hyper-V. It is doing a great job replacing Retrospect and Unitrends. In my Unitrends and Retrospect systems, I can run a report that tells me the rate of deduplication of the data I'm storing so I can see if we're storing a lot of data that is vastly different at the block level, or if we're storing a lot of data that is not changing much at the block level from day to day.

In Proxmox Backup Server, on each of the datastores I have a "deduplication factor" line and then a number. In my case the number is 177.09. The issue is I'm not able to find any documentation on what this number means or how it's calculated. Did I miss something? I can't seem to figure out what is changing it either. It has gone up and down over the past month with no real pattern I can work out.

Any help is appreciated. I've already poured over the documentation for PBS for hours and can't seem to find anything.

Also i would be cool, if pbs could provide more information. I.e. select a set of vms inside a bigger selection (or all) and then gernate a report of the exclusive size for that selection and also the common costs against the bigger set (i.e: if a block of 1mb from my selected backup is shared with 3 "other" backups, then this would account for a quarter mb). Such a report would be very helpfull in making decisions.

So if that is correct, a deduplication factor of 1 would be the lowest it could go?

Find elsewhere

Google Bing Mojeek

reddit.com › r/proxmox › pve backup vs pbs. do i need pbs

r/Proxmox on Reddit: PVE backup vs PBS. Do I need PBS

May 29, 2024 -

Am I correct in that the only benefit of PBS is that it provides a file-level restore? Otherwise, for a single node Proxmox VE, is the built-in backup function sufficient for being able to restore a corrupted VM or CT?

I am planning to use a 2TB external HDD connected via USB and create a backup job within ProxMox VE 8.2.2

Thank you for the advice.

If you want to keep backup growth in check then yes, you want PBS. The de-dupe and incremental is reason enough to go through with PBS. Saying nothing of the offsite replication option. Here is the first guide i followed to get PBS running in our labs for testing, give it a go you might find it better then you think. https://www.virtualizationhowto.com/2023/12/proxmox-backup-server-ultimate-install-backup-and-restore-guide/

It also includes scheduling, integrity checking, backup history, data-reduplication and an easy way of keeping your backups OFF your main server. the built in backup utility with PVE requires you to manually run the backups.

reddit.com › r/proxmox › someone please explain pbs files to me

r/Proxmox on Reddit: Someone please explain PBS files to me

February 21, 2024 -

Hey there,

i recently have taken up a new job and got handed a proxmox environment with a PBS.
Now the PBS is saving all its files on a QNAP - and i dont trust that old thing so I am currently working on migrating the files.

Now to the actual question:

The current PBS folder on the QNAP is telling me that its about 3.5 TB (1lxc + 11vms - each with multiple versions because of retention rules) in size but if i look into it and into the folders inside of it (ct, host, vm) all files combined are around 600MB.
Is qnap just stupid? are there some form of hidden files hiding in the pbs folder? Are the backups really just that small?

Don’t migrate the whole thing on NAS Level. You are taking a hard route, and there is a way easier one: Take your new Storage device and add it as a new Datastore into pbs. Then create a sync job on it to sync root-namespace and max depth with the same user to the new datastore. Maybe needs special permissions for the sync, but should only need read and audit permissions with modify permissions on the new Datastore. Start the sync and your data is (cleanly without the trash, if you don’t have run GC for a while) on the new Datastore. After that point your storage of the PVE to your new nameserver by editing the /etc/pve/storage.conf.

if I remember there is a .chunks folder where all data block is stored, the other file are just metadata and index. If you want to move from qnap, just rsync the whole folder onto another storage. Or, better, start a new PBS instance on the new hardware and use PBS sync functionnality to move data.

reddit.com › r/proxmox › why are my pbs backups not incremental?

r/Proxmox on Reddit: Why Are My PBS Backups Not Incremental?

January 8, 2025 -

I recently set up Proxmox Backup Server (PBS) and connected it to an NFS share on my NAS. After that, I linked the PBS to my Proxmox Virtual Environment (PVE) and configured backups.

From what I understand, one of the main benefits of PBS is its ability to perform incremental backups. However, when I check the backups, they all appear to be the same size, even though I made no changes to the container.

Did I miss something during the setup process? How can I ensure that the backups are incremental and not full backups each time?

I am pretty sure you didn't do anything wrong. Check how much disk is actually used. That number is not representative of what is consumed after deduping is done

PBS is doing full backups with dedup locally in PBS. Its an easier design but will also give you that each backup can be fully restored on its own without depending on other backup files as is the case if you would do incremental. The use of dedup in PBS will bring you a result that is equal or better than doing incremental with other backup solutions. When you say you connected a NFS share - is that for the PBS itself to use or to fetch the data to be backuped?

reddit.com › r/proxmox › veeam vs pbs backup

r/Proxmox on Reddit: Veeam vs pbs backup

April 16, 2025 -

I have used both veeam and proxnox backup. Pbs is very integrated and works well. Veeam is better on space and has better de duplication from what I can tell. What’s generally recommended to backup proxmox?

Side note if you add a second ssd drive to your server don’t use zfs. It crashes the whole server. I had to format the second drive to ext4 for the added space to work for veeam without crashing (virtual drive placed on the ext4).

We are migrating from VMware / Hyper to Proxmox. We have used Veeam for Hyper-V / Windows VMs. We are not quite sure if we should stick with veaam or also use PBS. The problem is the lack of restoring file on ntfs volumes with activated deduplication and no application awareness (Exchange, SQL, AD, ...).

Veeam requires a worker to be deployed on the hosts, whereas the PBS "client" is embedded in PVE. PBS lacks the central backup job management/scheduling, that Veeam has.

reddit.com › r/proxmox › why use pbs when pve can do essentially the same backups to a nfs/cif share?

r/Proxmox on Reddit: Why use PBS when PVE can do essentially the same backups to a NFS/CIF share?

September 4, 2021 -

I got my Proxmox server up and running and I created a NFS share on my DS920+, then mounted it in the PVE gui. I setup nightly snapshots of the VM and LXC running on it to the NFS share/mount. After reading around, I realized that PVE is not backing up any of it's config files or settings. I found shell script to make backups of all PVE configs and save them to the DS920+ and that is nice and all, but why would PVE only backup guests and not any of the core config?

I searched around and came across Proxmox Backup Server and found that I can run it in a VM on my DS920+. Perfect! This should solve my full backups needs! Wrong! It appears that it only backs up the guests, just like PVE. Who would have thought PBS would offer essentially the same backup functionality PVE? I mean it is called Proxmox Backup Server??

What does PBS offer that PVE doesn't as far as backups go?

In addition to file level restores PBS creates incremental backups of your VMs. The backup function Proxmox VE offers just takes a full backup every single time. Incremental backups are quicker and more space efficient than the full backups Proxmox takes. I used the Proxmox VE backup for a while but the storage required to backup all my VMs was significant so I setup a PBS server and I am much happier with how well that works.

PBS allows file level restores, for one.

reddit.com › r/proxmox › newbie here: what are the benefits of proxmox backup server along with pve home server?

r/Proxmox on Reddit: Newbie here: What are the benefits of Proxmox Backup Server along with PVE home server?

March 16, 2022 -

Beginner here. Recently I started running a PVE with 6 VM+Containers in a home server machine. It works fine for last 4 months. Now I have a spare Intel NUC with a 2TB drive storage connected, installed with PBS as trial.

Tried integrating PVE with PBS and able to run VM backup jobs configured in PVE with PBS as detination. This is good. But currently I am able to achieve the same with a network drive as destination. What is the value addition with PBS?
Currently I do backup of PVE host with "zfs send" to network drive. I don't see option to backup PVE host through PBS. Am I missing anything else?
There is a TrueNAS VM runs on PVE. This VM hosts most of my home data. I would like to backup this NAS drive to PBS. Is there any TrueNAS + PBS integration possible?
What are the other features which is good to try and use? I would like to know the value addition in running a PBS.

1: PBS stores backups in a highly compressed and deduplicated way, so (in simple words) if a file exists in many backups from the same VM/CT or from different VMs/CTs, it's stored only once. Moreover, you can restore individual files from backups stored in PBS. 2: to backup a physical computer to pbs, you have to install proxmox-backup-client, see https://pbs.proxmox.com/docs/backup-client.html . Then generate a token in PBS and use it to authenticate your physical computer at backup time. 3: IIRC VM disks are stored in PBS as images, so yes, it's possible. 4: You can set up a secondary PBS and schedule the sync of backups from primary to secondary

Everything PBS does can be done in many different ways. The value PBS brings is its web based GUI. It makes administration much, mich simpeler. You can delegate backup tasks to people who you would not normally trust around a CLI for example :-)

reddit.com › r/proxmox › reduce size of backups

r/Proxmox on Reddit: reduce size of backups

September 7, 2022 -

running 8 containers and 2 vms. daily backup is around 12gb in size even with zstd compression. I see a lot of redundancy in the content of the containers (the base system from the distro), but this can't be leveraged because each container is backed up individually

is there a way of optimizing the size of the daily backups? was thinking of a hard separation of os and data using two volumes , and only running backup on the data volume. but this would mean that I would have to setup the system from scratch /ansible in case of recovery rather than just reading in the archive file

any hints? thanks

Proxmox backup server. It has deduplication. My storage is 30:1 atm

+1 for PBS.. it's amazing.. I have two machines running Proxmox.. on both machines i have PBS as a VM.. and then a sync job from one to the other. And also a full backup to USB drive.. I hope I'm covered :)

reddit.com › r/proxmox › pbs, what setup should i choose?

r/Proxmox on Reddit: PBS, what setup should I choose?

January 13, 2025 -

I (will) run my homeserver on PVE with an Intel 12th gen (gbit ethernet). It has about 1.5TB in photo's and videos (pretty stable size) + 30+ docker containers & Home Assistant OS VM.

Currently I use Borg / Vorta to backup to my RPI4 + 2 external drives.

Now, I would like to start using PBS (and dedupe) but I would like to hear some thoughts about the options I have:

Run PBS on RPI4 (8gb, ethernet) using PiPBS?
Run Debian on RPI4 and share drives to PVE. Then PVE to run a VM/LXC with PBS (using the shared drives)
Use my 24/7 windows desktop (i3-8100, 16gb, wifi6 connection) to run PBS in a VM
Other?

I'm not a fan of buying something new if I don't have another purpose then 1 nightly backup for it. PiHole, VPN etc I can already run on my homeserver, so not sure what I would need additional hardware for. But if you see a good reason, then please let me know. Thanks!

Some containers and HAOS I would like to be able to restore within a day, but if the bulk of the data takes a couple of days that's no issue. I would roll out the ethernet cable for my windows desktop for emergency situations.

Thoughts?

I use your second option (PBS in LXC backing up to SMB share) and it works fine. I've had a drive with a bunch of VMs and containers fail (including my PBS LXC), and separately also had to reinstall PVE from scratch. In the case of losing your PBS LXC or PVE host all you have to do is: Spin up a new PBS LXC (ttek's script is great for this, just make sure the LXC is privileged if necessary), preferably keeping the same container # as your previous one Then follow the instructions from this comment to add your existing datastore Delete your "old" PBS instance from your PVE storage and add your new instance Restore all of your VMs/containers As far as PBS being resource hungry, idk. Mine is running with 2 cores of a 3700x and 2gb of ram and it's fine. I had, at one point, given it 6 cores and 8gb of ram and noticed no performance difference. The biggest performance difference will be using solid state storage instead of HDD for your datastore, if you can.

PBS in lxc on the proxmox host and backup to arbitrary storage. It is really not resource hungry at all, not sure why people say that here, you can run it on a crappy tiny pc without any issues. I also run pbs on another windows machine in docker and pull occasionally. You can do this at any other location as well.

reddit.com › r/proxmox › pbs sync jobs with backup

r/Proxmox on Reddit: PBS Sync Jobs with Backup

July 30, 2024 -

Just an FYI, this is a homelab, not a business.

So I have been reading through the docs a bit on PBS's ability to backup to another location. So far I have only been able to find the ability to use remotes and sync jobs. I have seen the NFS setup mentioned but I assume that means directly from my main Proxmox servers, not PBS. I noticed it mentioned in docs that it pulls the data from a remote datastore rather than the main datastore sending it out.

I liked this setup for one reason. I always had issues with NFS randomly losing connection with my NAS. I have messed with it for too long to care at this point. I have a dedicated PBS machine with mirrored SSD's. I would like to make backups of it to my NAS without using NFS mounts and also utilizing PBS's features of dedup and efficiency.

So is it feasible to create a second PBS instance on my NAS (as a VM) with its datastore being a dataset or zvol (NAS uses ZFS) and syncing from the main PBS? Pros to this are that I use PBS's features, PBS manages when things are deleted (not the NAS OS), and I can switch between the two PBS instances to restore a VM. I thought about just getting rid of the current PBS machine and putting it on my NAS but I would lose the dual PBS setup. My NAS is backed up to another onsite NAS and to an Offsite NAS at my parents.

Please let me know if there are other options that I am not aware of. I also do understand keeping a NAS separate from my VM's which is normally what I do aside from apps or systems that benefit from having access to the datasets directly rather than over the network (media server, device backups, server backups, etc. Although maybe a direct link between the services server and the NAS could change that).

That should work fine, as long as the vms you are backing up are not on the NAS you have the 2nd pbs running. (Technically it could be, but would not be good in the case your NAS has a problem... but at least there would be the offsite NAS)

For redundancy and to avoid NFS issues, setting up a secondary PBS instance as a VM on your NAS, using its ZFS dataset or zvol for storage, is a great approach! With this, you can leverage PBS's deduplication and backup features while maintaining the ability to switch between PBS instances if one fails. By syncing the main PBS with this secondary instance, you can ensure continuous backup and restore, while keeping VM data separate and well-managed.

reddit.com › r/proxmox › i wrote a hands-on proxmox backup server guide for homelab and small business. setup, with screenshots, and the ssd fix you helped me find.

r/Proxmox on Reddit: I wrote a hands-on Proxmox Backup Server guide for homelab and small business. Setup, with screenshots, and the SSD fix you helped me find.

May 18, 2026 -

I run PBS on a $150 fanless mini-PC backing up 21 VMs and 2 containers to a Synology NAS. Dedup factor 25x, 1.77TB used.

The guide covers setup, installation, verification, and pruning jobs, retention policy gotchas, PBS vs Veeam, and my full homelab setup with screenshots.

Some of you helped me last week when I posted about my 8.5-hour verify times on NFS. Based on your feedback, I bought a Lexar SL300 USB SSD and set it up as a second datastore. Full verify dropped from 8h 35m to 1h 54m. Daily verification with Skip Verified now takes 2 seconds.

https://edywerder.ch/proxmox-backup-server/

I still believe you should just host Pbs on your synology directly... Then free up that mini pc for other uses

This is great, and just before I’m about to set up PBS on a machine for the first time. Looks like I should use my usb SSD rather than the “spare” 8TB HDD I was going to use. Thanks!