Nov 15, 2024 Last updated Nov 15, 2024 1 min read

Encrypted Backups on Proxmox to External Storage

There are a few pitfalls with Proxmox backups:

Proxmox Backup Server supports encryption, deduplication, integrity check but it doesn't support remote storage, attached via SMB or NFS.
PBS has a remote sync but it only works between 2 PBS instances.
Proxmox itself supports remote storage for backups but it doesn't support encryption, deduplication, and integrity check

The solution that I've found so far:

Run PBS as a VM on the node itself
Make encrypted & deduplicating backups of all VMs into PBS.
Make a backup of the PBS VM instance to external storage via the Proxmox backup feature

This allows to make encrypted & deduplicated backups that can be put into untrusted 3rd party storage.