Schedule Backup Job with PBS

This guide goes over scheduling backup job with PBS server. Proxmox Virtual Environment can run it's own jobs, but for best optimization, using deducation and verify jobs, having PBS is good idea. Also, it provides redundancy if pve goes down. 
 Using Proxmox Backup Server (PBS) over Proxmox VE (PVE) native backups offers several significant advantages, particularly for environments requiring efficient, secure, and reliable backup management. The primary benefit is that PBS performs incremental backups, transferring only changed data since the last backup, which drastically reduces backup time and network bandwidth usage compared to PVE’s full backup approach that copies entire VM or container images each time. This incremental method, combined with advanced deduplication, ensures that duplicate data across multiple VMs or containers is stored only once, leading to substantial space savings and allowing for more frequent backups without excessive storage consumption. 
 
 Setting up Datastore in Proxmox Backup Server 
 
 Login to PBS 
 Under Datastore click Create Datastore 
 
 Name: Choose name to call it 
 Backup Path: Select the path to folder directory on the machine. If not using volume from machine check out this article to use NAS storage via NFS 
 Under Prune option this is personal preference, but deduplication really lowers the amount of space needed, so keeping more backups is not bad decision. 
 
 
 Once done click Add 
 
 
 When the datastore is added, clicking on datastore will give you info, and also ability to adjust Prune and CG Jobs. Also, under Verify Jobs it's good idea to add Verify Job for checking that backup isn't corrupted and that will work when needed. 
 
 Under Prune & CG Jobs make sure CG Job is set to daily. You can adjust Prune job here as well 
 Under  Verify Job  click  Add  and schedule Verify to run Daily and Re-Verify to run every 30 days 
 
 It is optional to create a namespace. Storing your backups in separate namespaces is very useful if you ever plan on planning to use your PBS to store backups from multiple Proxmox hosts, or even other Linux server. 
 
 
 Under Content click Add Namespace 
 
 Parent Namespace: This would be folder in which this subfolder will live, usually root 
 Namespace Name: name of the folder where backups will live 
 
 
 
 
 Adding PBS Database on PVE instance 
 
 Select Datacenter > Storage > Add > Proxmox Backup Server 
 Set the parameters to match the information below:
 
 ID: the name you’d like to use (I use pbs-backups) 
 Server: IP address of Proxmox Backup Server 
 Username: bservice@pbs (use user made specifically for pbs to pve connection). 
 Password: Password of the user 
 Datastore: Name of the datastore you created in PBS 
 Namespace: if you have namespace add it here 
 Fingerprint: hash from PBS server. Paste the fingerprint copied from the PBS dashboard  
 Add Database 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 Add a Backup Job in PVE 
 
 Login back to Proxmox Virtual Environment 
 Select  Datacenter then Backup, then select Add 
 
 Under General 
 
 Select PBS Storage 
 Schedule put a time that works best 
 Selection Mode: best to do All 
 Mode: Stapshot is the most reliable for daily backup. Stop can be run once a week 
 
 
 Retention
 
 This is configured on PBS side 
 
 
 
 
 Click  OK  to schedule the backup