Backups

Every Proxmox host ships with snapshots built in, and they’re so easy to take that it’s tempting to treat them as your backup strategy. Click “Snapshot” before a risky change, click “Rollback” if it goes wrong, done. That workflow is genuinely useful, and you should use it. It is also not a backup, and conflating the two is one of the more common ways homelab operators discover, at the worst possible moment, that they had less protection than they thought. ...

Backups are the thing every homelab guide tells you to do and almost nobody actually verifies works until the day they need it. Proxmox makes this easier than most platforms because it ships a real backup product, Proxmox Backup Server (PBS), instead of leaving you to bolt one on yourself. Here’s how to actually set it up, what it buys you over the built-in vzdump backups, and the one step most people skip that makes the whole thing worthless if you never do it. ...