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!

  • Appoxo@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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    1 year ago

    If you are not afraid of Windows: Veeam B/R (Community Edition)

    It has a nice GUI and works very well.
    GUI is well explained, knowledgebases for Hyper-V, VMware and some others.
    The Agent can be deployed manually and linux agents can write to a repository.
    I don’t think Proxmox is a supported hypervisor.

    Community Edition is free
    I think up to 10 workloads

    Maybe take a look.

    You could try to get hands on a NFR license that has the premium features with a 1 year runtime

    Edit: I use Windows Agent for my personal rig and backup via SMB.
    We use it at work so I am partially biased to that solution.

    • jubilationtcornpone@sh.itjust.works
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      1 year ago

      I’ll second Veeam. It only runs on Windows but as far as backup and recovery software goes it’s the gold standard and the competition is not even close.

      • Oisteink@feddit.nl
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        1 year ago

        You ever had it back up a proxmox cluster? I’d say it’s suboptimal advice to go for veeam for this use-case.

        Yeah - i use veeam for backups at work, but we run VMware, some MS servers and use rsync or bacula for our Linux boxes. A great product.

        • warmaster@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          What would you recommend for me?

          I have a homelab with:

          1 laptop on Windows

          3 desktop PCs (2 on Linux, 1 on Windows)

          1 server running Proxmox VE

          1 old 2 bay Synology NAS.