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Backups

how everything gets off the cluster. this section is being written as i rework it, so parts describe a plan and say so. the backup server itself, retention, verification and users, is on the PBS page.

what goes where

what how lands on state
VMs proxmox backup job, snapshot mode, every two hours PBS on TrueNAS working, see VM backups
cephFS (all swarm stack data) proxmox-backup-client from a proxmox node, hourly PBS on TrueNAS working, being redesigned, see cephFS backups
databases on cephFS dumps written before the snapshot cephFS, then PBS planned
raspberry pi (pi-zwave01) proxmox-backup-client on the pi, hourly PBS on TrueNAS working, see raspberry pi
portainer configuration portainer's own scheduled backup S3 on TrueNAS working, see portainer

the gap VM backups leave

a VM backup is the VM's disks. the swarm's shared data reaches the VMs over virtioFS, which is not a disk, so none of the stack data is in the VM backups. that is what the cephFS backup is for. same goes for anything a guest mounts itself, an RBD image or an NFS share.

rules i am working to

  • backups live off the thing they protect. PBS and S3 are on the NAS, not on ceph
  • it is not off-site yet. PBS and S3 are on the same box. PBS 4.2 supports S3-compatible storage as a datastore backend, which is the likely route for an off-site copy
  • the credential that writes backups should not be able to delete them. PBS's DatastoreBackup role can back up and restore its own backups but not prune them, and retention is a prune job on the PBS side. the cephFS token has only that role. the VM storage still logs in as PBS root@pam, so that one is still to do
  • consistent beats live. a copy of a database's files taken while it writes may not start. dump it, or snapshot first
  • silence is not success. a failed backup should tell me. the VM job mails on failure. the cephFS job has nothing yet
  • a backup nobody has restored is a hope. restore tests are still to do