Backing up Proxmox VMs to Backblaze B2

There are many ways to backup VMs on a Proxmox hypervisor :

Use their “Proxmox Backup Server” — this is a great option because it offers incremental backups & deduplication. Use a ZFS volume to store your VMs and use zfs send to backup the snapshots to a remote system Copy the backup files to S3 compatible storage such as Backblaze B2 or Amazon S3. We will be doing the latter due to the fact that is it simple and cost effective.

Here are the steps involved :

• Install minio-client or s4cmd on your Proxmox host
• Create a bucket for the backups
• Edit the crontab of the Proxmox host as below

10 21 * * * /usr/bin/mc cp --newer-than 1d /mnt/pve/backups/dump/* s3/proxmox-backups/

After you have saved the crontab the backup should run and you can then control your storage utilisation by using bucket lifecycle policies.

This isn’t a very bandwidth efficient method but it is simple and effective. The only real gripe I have is that is is a bit painful to manage the retention of backups as you essentially need to do this in proxmox and in S3/B2.

This could easily be fixed by creating buckets with different retention policies, but that is an optimisation for later!