Hi everyone,

I’ve been running a home server with Arch Linux (i7-3770, 16 GB RAM) for a few years now. It’s a mix of Docker containers and some services directly on the host system. I’m trying to move everything to containers though.

For storage, I’m currently using a 256 GB SSD for the host system and three 6 TB HDDs in a RAID 5 for data storage. Backups are currently stored on the same hardware (not the best idea, I know) with Borg Backup.

I wanted to upgrade and rebuild my home server setup as I have a PC I don’t use anymore (i7-8700K, 32 GB RAM), two 18 TB HDDs, a 256 GB PCIe m.2 SSD and a 1 TB PCIe m.2 SSD.

So my available hardware is this:

  • PC 1 - i7-3770, 16 GB RAM, 256 GB SATA SSD, 3x 6 TB HDD
  • PC 2 - i7-8700K, 32 GB RAM, 256 GB PCIe m.2 SSD, 1 TB PCIe m.2 SSD, 2x 18 TB HDD

Initially, I wanted to just move everything to PC 2 and be done with it but I’ve stumbled upon Proxmox and wanted to check if it makes sense to build a nice setup with this. At least some of the Docker containers could be converted to LXC or VMs. The rest could stay as Docker containers in a VM I guess.

I could do something like this:

  • PC 1 as a Proxmox Backup Server host
  • PC 2 as a Proxmox VE host

A lot of data on the current 12 TB RAID 5 doesn’t need to be backed up so 12 TB just for backup storage should be enough.

I’m not sure if that’s the best/most efficient way to use this mix of hardware, maybe someone has a similar setup or other advice :) I’m also trying to save as much energy as possible even though that might be hard with 2 physical servers. (Does Proxmox BS turn off HDDs when they’re not in use?)

I’m not super fixed on Proxmox although it does look like it’s easy to manage without a lot of maintenance involved.

  • @ikiddEnglish
    2•1 year ago

    PBS is a good backup solution, and it will also replicate to an external harddrive if you want an offsite. The backups are navigable/downloadable in the interface and with the CLI client, you could restore full trees back to a system or VM, besides being able to restore the whole image into a new VM. It also dedups quite heavily so you can keep months of images on little disk space.

    Personally, I would leave PBS separate on a weak computer, it doesn’t take much of a system to run it, for the reason you state. You can also backup the PVE host to that computer using rsync on the important bits like the /etc/pve folder as per the forum suggestions.

    If you have other questions you can’t get answered here, consider signing in to https://discourse.practicalzfs.com where there a number of Reddit refugees to answer questions. There’s also some Proxmox forums on Lemmy here but none are very active yet.