When I (re-) started Proxmox on my NUC, I just wanted to get it up and running as fast and as simple as possible. A big ‘todo’ that was left: simple and reliable backups.

The WordPress websites on my NUC are very low traffic with little changes in content. So I don’t need backups very often. I guess a weekly backup is more than sufficient. My AI helper (mainly ChatGPT) advised me to make symlinks to a seperate storage on Proxmox for all ‘volatile data’ in the containers. And then make a backup solution for the folders in this storage environment.

I decided for a simpler solution, using Proxmox weekly scheduled full container backups to a USB drive connected to the NUC. Took some time to re-format the drive, but after that it is simple standard functionality of Proxmix to schedule a backup dat creates “vz dumps” of the container on the USB drive.

I tested the backup itself (not the restore yet) and I am happy sofar. A backup file of an LXC container is aroud 300MB and backup is very fast (around 5 seconds).

To be investigated: can Proxmox send the backup file to a remote location?

UPDATE: had some additional time today, so I decided to finish the whole remote storing and scheduling stuff as well. So now every Sunday at 01:00 a backup of my LXC containers/VM’s is created on the connected USB harddrive. And every Sunday at 05:00 the backup files are encrypted and send to my dropbox using rclone. Took some time (and ChatGPT of course) to figure it out and set it up, but now it looks like it works like a charm. Waiting for next Sunday to see if the scheduling also works…