Storage

ZFS is the default filesystem on Proxmox VE for good reason — checksumming, snapshots, compression, and built-in replication. But “default” doesn’t mean one-size-fits-all. Pool layout, recordsize, snapshot cadence, and backup strategy all depend on your workload. This post covers the ZFS setup on my Proxmox host (SRV1), the snapshot pipeline, and how ZFS send/receive + sanoid handle retention and offsite recovery. Pool Layout System: HP ProDesk 600 G4 DM (i5-8500T, 32 GB RAM) Disks: 1× NVMe (OS + VMs), 1× SATA SSD (bulk storage) Boot/OS Pool — rpool Standard Proxmox installation creates rpool on the boot disk. No RAID, no redundancy — just a single NVMe: ...

Proxmox Backup Server (PBS) is purpose-built backup storage for Proxmox VE. It does one thing and does it well: store, deduplicate, verify, and garbage-collect VM and container backups. No more cramming vzdump archives onto a NFS share and hoping they survive. This guide covers installing PBS on Debian 12, creating a datastore with sane retention, connecting a PVE host, and avoiding the gotchas that’ll eat your disk space. Why PBS Instead of a Simple NFS Export Capability NFS vzdump PBS Deduplication None Chunk-level, across all backups Incremental backups Full dump each time Changed blocks only Integrity verification None Auto-verify after backup Garbage collection None Prunes orphaned chunks Restore granularity Full restore only File-level, single disk, or full VM For a homelab with multiple VMs and LXCs, the deduplication alone saves hours of transfer and disk space. Incremental backups mean daily backups take seconds, not minutes. ...