Proxmox VE Full Course: Class 10 - Backups and Snapshots

[Music] you know as a tech youtuber i find myself telling you guys to back up your servers all the time and other youtubers that are in the same space as me they basically say the same thing and there's a good reason for that it's extremely important and i'll never understand why so many people out there just you know they don't do a good job of backing up their servers but i know that's not you because i know you are great at backing up your servers but i'm going to make it even better because what i'm going to do in this video is i'm going to teach you guys about backups and snapshots in proxmox so let's take a look alright so let's take a look at backups and snapshots as we've gone through the series so far i've created a few containers and i've also created a few virtual machines now to be honest i don't have all that much going on right now these particular containers and vms all they really include is apache and the default apache configuration is what they have so all they have is the default start page but what we're going to do instead is pretend that these are extremely important and we definitely want to back these up now proxmox supports both snapshots and backups we're going to look at both in this video so what i'm going to do is start with virtual machines and i'm going to click on this one right here and you'll notice that we have a backup section here as well as a snapshot section so what's the difference between a backup and a snapshot so let me try to explain the difference so the thing is a backup is completely separate from the virtual machine i mean it's not separate in terms of it being a backup of the virtual machine it includes everything on the disk because it is actually a full clone of the disk but you can move this back up to another storage media and if you have shared storage for example if you have a trunast system on your network you can actually mount that storage which we'll be covering later in the series and send your backups over to that in addition to that there's a dedicated proxmox backup server that's something that i'm going to be going over in a dedicated video but i just bring it up because i want you guys to know that it does exist now a snapshot on the other hand is actually a part of the virtual machine itself you can't actually take the snapshot and move it to another system in fact snapshots are actually a part of the virtual machine disk not a clone of the virtual machine disk like a backup is so you might be wondering when you should use the backup feature and when you should consider using a snapshot now part of that is down to personal preference in my opinion a snapshot makes a lot of sense when you want to test a piece of software you're not really sure how that software is going to behave or maybe you want to evaluate the software and find out if it's a good fit for the purpose that you are installing it for in that case it makes sense to create a snapshot and then you could test that piece of software and then if you decide that you don't like it or something like that you could just revert the snapshot and it'll be just like you've never installed that particular application of course you can just uninstall the application you don't need a snapshot for that but sometimes when you install an application and then remove it there's bits and pieces basically junk files all over the disk and even when you uninstall the application it's possible that some of those files might remain so snapshots are a really good idea when you're testing something so let's see a quick example of that i'm going to take a snapshot of this virtual machine right here i'll click take snapshot and let's just say i want to remove apache i'm going to give this snapshot a name that's going to help me understand exactly what its purpose is so i'll just name it before removing apache simple enough now one thing that i want to call your attention to is this box right here for include ram this is pretty cool so you could think of this as snapshots on steroids i mean normally a snapshot is just a snapshot of the disk and actually if you choose to include ram and that means you're going to get a snapshot that'll include this state in memory as well which could actually be really cool it could be very useful you could have a snapshot that not only includes the disk for the current state of the disk as well as ram now i'm going to uncheck this because i don't really need that for this demonstration i'll just click take snapshot and let's see the process and as you can see it's fast that was really quick and snapshots generally are very quick that's one of the benefits and we have the snapshot right here it tells us when the snapshot was created and i didn't change anything on the virtual machine but i did create a snapshot so what i can do now is actually change something on the vm and then see how to revert that change but first of all i do need to know the ip address so i can go ahead and connect to it i prefer to use ssh when i can and there we have the ip address so what i'll do is switch over to a terminal and now i'm connected to the virtual machine so what i'm going to do is remove apache to be on the safe side i'll add the purge option and i'm going to remove the apache 2 package before i do that though i'll just open up a new tab here and i'll prove that apache is currently working and there's the default start page so far so good so back here in the terminal what i'm going to do is complete this command right here and now apache is uninstalled you don't believe me what i'll do is refresh this page and of course it doesn't work now what i'm going to try to do here is install nginx instead so i'll run sudo apt install nginx just like that you don't have to follow along with this it's just an example let's refresh the page and now we have the engine extart page so i've successfully switched this particular server from apache over to engine x now the thing is i don't actually have a preference between the two but i wanted to give you guys something different and enginex is something different compared to what we had before so we have nginx here what if i wanted to revert the change that i just made i did create a snapshot before i did anything basically so i'll click right here i'll go over to snapshots and what i want to do is roll this back i'll confirm it it tells me that it's done so let's click over to the console and since i didn't choose to include ram the state of the machine was not saved so i will need to start it up again just wait for it to boot up and now it started so if i go right here and refresh the page we're back to apache so you can immediately see the value of snapshots you could test something and then revert it back and that's a very powerful ability to have as an administrator of virtual machines you will definitely find yourself doing this quite a bit so snapshots for the most part are fairly self-explanatory let's go ahead and move on to backups when we create a backup of a virtual machine there's a few other options that we can choose so it's not incredibly complex but there's a few other options here so what i'm going to do is click backup now and as you can see we have additional options right here we could choose where we want this particular backup to go i only have local storage right here now as an aside lvm thin which is the storage that i've been using for virtual machine disks that's not listed here but for right now i only have this one option i don't have all that much space here so that's not great that's why it's probably a good idea to store the backup somewhere else but actually it's always a good idea to store the backup somewhere else i mean if you are keeping all of your backups here on proxmox itself and then proxmox goes down maybe your disk goes bad or something like that well if that's the case you lose the backups as well so even though it's called a backup in this case i don't really consider it a backup if it's not somewhere else but again we'll get to shared storage later in the series so we're not going to worry about that aspect so much right now now we have several options right here as far as how the backup is going to be captured we have snapshot mode suspend mode and stop mode which of these should you actually choose so each of these different modes pertains to how much downtime you're willing to have if you have a virtual machine that absolutely cannot go down for any reason that's going to limit your options quite a bit now at the expense of less downtime you're actually increasing the possibility for disk corruption it's incredibly uncommon but it could happen think of it this way if you are creating a backup of a disk and that disk has open files and files are being written to then if you take a backup in the middle of a file being written to it's possible that maybe data hasn't finished writing when the backup is created so there could be some integrity problems there however in the back end of proxmox itself it has some magic and some kung fu basically that it tries to do to eliminate problems like that it's still a possibility it's unlikely but just keep in mind that these options generally pertain to how much downtime you're going to have and more downtime in this case means better integrity it's kind of like a trade-off so let's go over stop mode first if we set it to stop mode that's actually going to stop the vm and i literally mean shutdown it's going to execute an orderly shutdown of the virtual machine and then create a backup that also means that your backup if you choose this option will have the best consistency and once the virtual machine is shut down a back-end process within proxmox will kick off and create the backup if the virtual machine was running when you kicked off the backup process then once it's done it's going to start the vm for you the vm was stopped when he created the backup then it won't do that so that's the stop option we also have an option for suspend mode as well now the proxmox documentation actually doesn't like or recommend this option because it results in the greatest amount of downtime in my opinion whether or not this is actually a good or bad option depends on the use case and the importance level of the virtual machine if it's not really a big deal to suspend it for a while then i don't really see anything wrong with it now you can think of suspend like suspend on your laptop or your desktop a lot of laptops and desktops will go into suspend mode when you don't press any keys for a certain amount of time and then to resume the computer you just press any key or press the power button and it comes back to life in suspend mode in that case your laptop or desktop will resume exactly where you left off you could think of suspend mode here as pretty much exactly the same thing it's going to put your vm into suspend mode and once it is it's going to create the backup then once the backup is done it's going to resume the vm now the virtual machine will not be accessible at all while the backup is happening in suspend mode just keep that in mind but being in suspend mode does actually increase the consistency of the backup so the trade-off might be worth it another option that we have here is snapshot mode and that's a little confusing i just went over snapshots that's the option right here now i'm going over backups so why is there a snapshot option for a backup now the snapshot mode isn't actually the same thing as snapshots like i've gone over in the past this is a specific mode of the backup feature and this actually results in the least amount of downtime when it comes to backups so if you're able to use this option it's the one that i recommend now in a nutshell the way a snapshot mode backup actually works is that once you kick it off proxmox is going to create a backend process in the system itself that's going to do a live backup of that vm and that's going to actually capture data blocks while the vm is running if you have the qemu agent installed then it's actually going to increase the consistency of the backup which is yet another reason to make sure that all of your vms actually have that installed so on my end that's actually the option i'm going to go with i'll click backup and let's see the process play out and now the process is finished but if you take a look at the output something that you'll see here that's fairly interesting you can see that the qemu agent executed a file system freeze command and that's helpful because again that's going to improve consistency so it's in snapshot mode it's going to freeze the file system and then it's going to resume the vm and then create the backup like you can see right here so if this option works out for you i highly recommend that you choose that particular option when you create your backup and then right here we have the backup so i could click restore if i wanted to restore that snapshot and even though i didn't actually change anything i'll just go ahead and do it just so you can see what it looks like and i'm going to leave everything here i mean you could choose a different storage if you wanted to but i'm going to leave it at the default which is essentially just going to restore the backup where the original already is so i'll just click restore and i'll say yes and right now it's actually complaining that the vm is running so what i'm going to need to do is actually shut it down and now that it's shut down let's try that again i'll click restore i'll leave the storage option here alone but what i am going to do is check this box right here because i do want this vm to start as soon as it's done restoring so i'll click restore i'll confirm it and now it's restoring and as you can see the process is finished and the vm is starting up so after the backup is restored it did exactly as i asked it to do and started the vm so that part's pretty simple now the thing is backups are great but if you don't actually have this automated then well i mean you'll probably forget we're all human i know i would so if you go here to data center view before we were just clicking on vms and running backups and snapshots within the vm settings but the data center view like i mentioned earlier in the series pertains to every server and every vm so if i go to the backup options here underneath data center then what i could do is add a task and this is going to allow me to create a backup job this is how you automate backups and these settings here like i mentioned allow you to create a backup job that pertains to every server and every vm so what you could do is back up each node independently and by node it's talking about the proxmox node so in my case pve1 is the only one that i have so i'm not actually able to choose anything else but if i had other servers here that i could have a separate backup job for each maybe i could have the backups for one server kicking off at midnight and then another server at 1am and then the third server at 2 am however you want to do it but i'm going to leave it on all because i only have that one anyway now for storage when this backup job runs this is going to allow you to determine where the backups end up which again we'll get to later so for now i'm just going to leave it on local then we set the day of the week so perhaps you might want this to run on fridays and you can select individual days here as you can see but i'm just going to make this run every friday i think that's good enough and then you can choose the start time so maybe this particular server i wanted to start backing up all the vms at one in the morning selection mode we can include the selected vms so we can just choose which ones we want to be a part of this backup job but i'm not necessarily a fan of that what i'm going to do instead is choose all and that's going to gray out this section right here now what all allows me to do is ensure that every vm is backed up like it mentions it says all and it means all but another benefit of that is as i add new virtual machines to the server it's going to make sure that those are backed up as well so i don't have to go in here every time and add virtual machines manually if i set it to all it's going to take care of that for me we could choose to have an email sent to a particular person or mailing list when the backup fires off that's a good idea then for the emails we can set it to always which means an email will always be sent when a backup job runs or we can set it to failure only which means we won't get an email unless there is a problem i'll leave that up to you now for compression i'm going to leave that alone we have that option in the normal backup settings as well i think leaving it at the default is more than adequate and then we can choose a mode for the backup job as well it's the same thing as doing a manual backup the same descriptions of what these modes mean applies here as well so here you just choose the mode that you like the best and every vm that's a part of this job will be backed up via that mode so that's pretty self-explanatory i'm going to leave it on snapshot mode in my case and then i'll click create so now we have the backup job right here now when we get to the point later in the series where we set up shared storage i recommend that you revisit this and change the settings such that it will create the backups in your shared storage which is a lot safer than creating the backups on the same server that you're backing up and also make sure you subscribe because at some point in the future i'm going to be doing a dedicated video on the proxmox backup server which is going to allow you to take this to a whole new level so there you go now you guys know how to create backups and snapshots within proxmox that's pretty cool now what's also pretty cool is the fact that proxmox makes available a standalone product called proxmox backup server and that particular product will help you take your proxmox backups to the next level now it's not actually part of this series but if enough of you guys want me to cover that what i'll do is i'll actually cover it in a standalone video so if you want me to do that please click that like button if you like this video that also helps youtube understand that you guys want to see more tutorials just like this and i should have the next video in this series uploaded very soon if i don't already have that uploaded so i'll see you there thanks for watching [Music] so [Music] you

Channel: LearnLinuxTV

Views: 6,912

Keywords: Linux, Tutorial, Guide, Learn Linux, open-source, open source, gnu/linux, LearnLinuxTV, proxmox, proxmoxve, proxmox ve, proxmox virtual environment, virtual environment, virtualization, virtualize, vm, virtual machine, hypervisor, kvm, qemu, proxmox getting started, proxmox tutorial, homelab setup, proxmox ve 7.0, how to, proxmox virtual environment tutorial, proxmox ve tutorial, virtual machines, proxmox 7 tutorial, home server, proxmox configuration, proxmox walkthrough, backup, snapshot

Id: NnKQnqoEm-I

Length: 20min 14sec (1214 seconds)

Published: Thu Sep 30 2021