Best Back Up Solution For Multiple Servers

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So, I run three VPS and one rack in the closet. Currently I have Duplicati running on all four servers. What I would like to do is have one central server back up all four servers and store the backups in an offsite repository.

I'd prefer something with a good GUI. I know you purist get a hard on thinking about the CLI, and while it is a very powerful aspect of Linux, I still like a GUI.

What are my options?

Side note, I wanted to look at Bacula but their site seems nonexistent. Is Bacula defunct?

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What's your hypervisor manager? Or are you just bare metal?

For VMWare and Proxmox both, I would recommend the community edition of Veeam. It can handle up to 10 VMs for free.

If you've got the funds as a small-to-large business, Veeam's first paid tier, on a yearly basis, is a solid option to backup even more.

Caveat emptor if you buy a license (or not), Veeam runs on Windows only. I have used, like, a single internal network Windows VM dedicated just to Veeam before.

Bacula is deprecated, unfortunately.

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I will always recommend Borg backup just because of it's compression+de-duplication algorithms:

550gb of raw data, 18 historical backups going back over a year (8.69tb of data total), only 400gb of disc space used to store them all...

You can backup directly to remote servers via ssh, nfs, or directly between two borg instances, optionally encrypted in transit and at rest.

Borg is a CLI tool normally, but there are a number of GUI frontends you can use if you really want:
Vorta, BorgWeb, and BorgWarehouse for example. (I've not used any of these, just examples from a google search)

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@Darkassassin07 @irmadlad @selfhosted I'm using restic, but I'm getting to a point where borgwarehouse might be a better solution, thanks!

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I run Proxmox on the local server. I didn't know Veeam had a community edition. The 13 gb download just finished. It's on the list. Thanks.

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I looked at Borg, didn't see a GUI, but Borgwarehouse look good. It's on the list. Thanks

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I’ve been quite happy with Proxmox Backup Server. I’ve had it running for years and it’s been pretty solid for all my VMs/containers. There’s also a bare metal client, which I’m adding to a couple cloud VPS machines this weekend. We’ll see how that goes.

Also, since it’s just Debian under the hood, I also use the PBS host as a replication target for my ZFS datasets via sanoid/syncoid.

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Will Proxmox BackUp server handle remote VPS? I had assumed that it only was for ProxMox VM's.

Backup Types: Proxmox Backup Server is optimized for backing up Proxmox VMs and containers. If your VPS is running a different virtualization platform, you may need to adapt your backup strategy accordingly.

That's what AI tells me and then gives a configuration such as:

::: spoiler spoiler

#!/bin/bash

# Variables
CONTAINER_NAME="your_container_name"
VOLUME_NAME="your_volume_name"
BACKUP_DIR="/path/to/backup/dir"
TIMESTAMP=$(date +"%Y%m%d_%H%M%S")

# Create a backup of the Docker volume
docker run --rm -v ${VOLUME_NAME}:/volume -v ${BACKUP_DIR}:/backup alpine \
    sh -c "cd /volume && tar czf /backup/${VOLUME_NAME}_${TIMESTAMP}.tar.gz ."

# Optionally, export the container
docker export ${CONTAINER_NAME} -o ${BACKUP_DIR}/${CONTAINER_NAME}_${TIMESTAMP}.tar

echo "Backup completed for ${CONTAINER_NAME} and ${VOLUME_NAME} at ${TIMESTAMP}"

:::

Yeah I know it's AI, which may or may not be completely accurate. Would I need to do that for each and every Docker container? I've got some 60 +/- containers. LOL <whine boohoo!>

That along with the client on the remote VPS would take care of Docker containers, however, I would also like to back up configuration files, and data associated with UFW, F2B, etc. Pretty much a snapshot of each server.

These lowendbox hosts don't include snapshots and frills and Contabo only lets you keep one snapshot active. I did find an N8N flow that automates the snapshot process for Contabo. I guess I could upgrade to better hosts, but one of the VPS is my skunk works server where I run and test everything before putting it into production...it's like $25 per year. Contabo is decent, and LuxVPS gives me the most bang for buck including all the frills for $10 a month. So, that's about as much fun money I got for the time being.

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I use Borgmatic for my scheduled backups, and sync to Backblaze B2 with Rclone. Works great!

My data doesn't compress as well as yours though.

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It sure will handle a remote VPS, it’s just not as automatic to set up as it is with PVE.

I put this off for a long time, but I finally did it this weekend.

Basically, you install the proxmox-backup-client utility and then run it via cron or a systemd timerto do the backup however often you want.

You’re responsible for getting the VPS to communicate with your backup server (like pretty much any self-hosted service), so some sort of VPN between them would be good. I used NetBird for that part and I have a policy that allows access from the client to PBS only on TCP port 8007.

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zfs send

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Using Veeam.
It's whole purpose is doing backups from small deployments up to the datacenter level.
Might be worth taking a look.
And the documentation is very good.

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Veeam community edition is fine for most things.
If you are cheeky, generate yourself an NFR license on their website.

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restic also written to do what borg does but fix a bunch of the shortcomings that they also now fixed in the new 2.0/2.x versions

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I use self hosted borg repo to backup to a local server and then also borgbase is a service that allows remote backup.

Borgmatic automates all of this.

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Best Back Up Solution For Multiple Servers