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!

  • 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.