Hey everyone,
I’m currently running a Proxmox VE server with about 10 VMs and LXCs. One of those is a Proxmox Backup Server VM—yes, I know it’s not the ideal setup to run PBS inside PVE, but so far, it has been working fine for local backups.
Recently, I wanted to set up offsite backups and purchased a Hetzner Storage Box for this purpose. My goal is to push backups from the local PBS to the Hetzner box.
Here’s what I’ve tried so far:
- Remote Datastore over SFTP/SMB: I attempted to mount the Hetzner box via SFTP, rclone, and SMB to make it accessible as a remote datastore in PBS. None of these worked reliably or were supported in a way that allowed me to use them as proper datastores.
Network storages are already not the best option in a local network and thus not recommended by the developers due to their bad performance, see https://forum.proxmox.com/threads/datastore-performance-tester-for-pbs.148694
Via Internet it's even worse.
- Remote PBS on VPS: I also spun up a VPS to host a remote instance of PBS to improve speed and latency. However, I ran into issues creating a datastore there or syncing data effectively.
Yes, this is the way to go. What exact issues did you have? Please note, that ou shouldn't use the storagebox for it but local storage on your vserver. For me this works fine on a Netcup vserver and and was quite straight-forward. I would expect that it's not that different with hetzner. Alternatively if you don't want to do the server maintenance there are PBS-as-service cloud providers like Inett, tuxis.nl and more whose names I forgot 
Alternatively you could setup a PBS at one friends or family members place.
- Manual rsync of chunk data: I tried rsyncing the chunk data directly, but PBS doesn't seem to recognize or work properly with the manually synced data.
This is known to break: https://forum.proxmox.com/threads/datastore-synced-with-rclone-broken.154709/
- What’s the recommended or best-practice setup for offsite backups with Proxmox Backup Server?
Using a remote PBS or alternativly tape backup (and storing them on another site) or an external storage device (like USB disc). Tape and usb storage needs more manual steps but a USB storage might be an option if you don't have a big budget: Buy two-three USB SSDs, store one of them at another location (e.G. friend/family members flat) and swap regulary their locations to sync your backups to them.
- Is there a supported method to back up to a Hetzner Storage Box?
No. Beginning with PBS4 you could alternatively use S3 cloud storage (like Hetzners S3 offerings or from another Cloud storage S3 provider) but I would only use this as a kind of last ressort since (according to Proxmox staff members) it's slower than using a sync between PBS instances. Depending on your amount of data and budget this might still be the best option.
If you absoluetly want to use the storagebox you may need to rethink your approach:
- Don't use PBS at all (or only on your local network), do your offsite backups with PVEs native vma-Backups to a cifs- or sshfs-mounted storagebox
- Split your backups by using a vserver PBS as offsite backup for the VMs and LXCs and a regular backup (like restic or borgbackup) tool inside your VMs/lxcs for bulk data. This is what I do: I use my PBS vserver for all my VMs and LXCs but not the data on my TrueNAS VM. The data stored on the NAS is backed up with restic to the storagebox.
!)