Managed Proxmox Backup Server

The managed Proxmox Backup Server (PBS) offer from HostMyServers lets you offload your Proxmox backups without running your own PBS instance. You get a dedicated datastore, provisioned from your client portal, with all native PBS features.

How PBS works

PBS does not store raw files. It splits data into chunks, stores each unique chunk only once through deduplication, and links each snapshot to an index that references those chunks.

Two chunking strategies are used depending on the data type:

Data type	Strategy	Format
QEMU VM disk images	Fixed-size chunks	.img
Filesystems (CT, host)	Variable-size chunks	.pxar

This approach makes backups incremental by default: only modified blocks are transferred during each job.

Supported backup types

PBS classifies backups into three types:

• vm — QEMU virtual machines: configuration + disk image(s)
• ct — LXC containers: configuration + filesystem archive
• host — Directory/file backups from any Linux server via the PBS client CLI

Each snapshot is uniquely identified by the triplet type/id/timestamp (e.g. vm/104/2025-04-10T02:00:00Z).

What the offer includes

• A dedicated PBS datastore, accessible via the PBS web interface and API
• Secure HTTPS connection (port 8007)
• Global deduplication (across all data types and VMs)
• Configurable retention policies and prune jobs from the client portal
• Schedulable garbage collection
• Integrity verification jobs (checksums)
• Namespace management for logical backup segmentation
• No-downtime capacity upgrades (250 GB → 10 TB)

Commercial details: Managed Proxmox Backup (PBS).

Typical use cases

• Offsite backups from a Proxmox VE cluster to a managed external datastore
• Multi-cluster: consolidate VMs from several Proxmox VE clusters (with overlapping VMIDs) into one datastore using namespaces
• Linux servers without Proxmox VE: back up directories or volumes via the proxmox-backup-client
• Disaster recovery: restore a full VM to a new host from the datastore

PBS snapshot structure

datastore/
└── [namespace]/
    ├── vm/
    │   └── 104/
    │       └── 2025-04-10T02:00:00Z/
    │           ├── index.json            (manifest: file list + checksums)
    │           ├── drive-scsi0.img.fidx  (disk index)
    │           └── vzdump.log
    └── ct/
        └── 200/
            └── 2025-04-10T03:00:00Z/
                ├── index.json
                └── root.pxar.didx        (archive index)

Prerequisites

Before getting started:

1. You have an active PBS service in your HostMyServers client portal
2. Your Proxmox VE server (>= 6.3) can reach the PBS endpoint via HTTPS on port 8007
3. You have the connection credentials available in the client portal (URL, username, token)

Recommended path

1. Getting started with the PBS interface
2. Connecting the datastore to Proxmox VE
3. Configuring retention and verification
4. Monitoring storage statistics
5. Upgrading capacity from the client portal