Proxmox, a company known for developing the Proxmox Virtual Environment and Proxmox Mail Gateway, has released version 3.3 of the Proxmox Backup Server distribution, presented as a ready-to-use solution for backing up and restoring virtual environments, containers, and server configurations. The installation ISO image is available for free download. Components specific to the distribution are open-sourced under the AGPLv3 license. For updates, both a paid Enterprise repository and two free repositories are available, which differ in the stabilization level of updates.
The system part of the distribution is based on the Debian package base and OpenZFS. The software stack for managing backups is written in Rust and supports incremental backups (only changed data is transferred to the server), deduplication (only one copy is kept if duplicates exist), compression (ZSTD is used), and encryption of backups. The system is designed based on a client-server architecture – Proxmox Backup Server can be used both for working with local backups and as a centralized server for backing up data from different hosts. It provides modes for fast selective recovery and data synchronization between servers.
Proxmox Backup Server supports integration with Proxmox VE for backup of of virtual machines and containers. Backup management and data recovery are performed through a web interface. There is a possibility of user access segregation to their own data. All traffic transmitted from clients to the server is encrypted using AES-256 in GCM mode, and the backups themselves are transmitted already encrypted using asymmetric encryption with public keys (encryption is performed on the client side, and compromising the server with backups will not lead to data leakage). The integrity of the backups is monitored using SHA-256 hashes.
In the new release:
- Synchronization has been performed with the Debian package base 12.8. The Linux kernel has been updated to version 6.8.12. An option with the 6.11 kernel package has been added. The ZFS filesystem implementation has been updated to OpenZFS version 2.2.6.
- Support for the 'push' mode for synchronized jobs (sync jobs) has been added, allowing snapshots to be copied with backups from local storage to external storage based on Proxmox Backup Server. This is useful in situations where the external server cannot initiate a connection to the local one. In the previously supported 'pull' mode, the external server retrieved backups from local storage, whereas in the new 'push' mode, the local server sends backups to the external one.
- Support for removable media storage has been added. Among other things, a removable storage created on one server, can be connected to other servers based on Proxmox Backup Server. Mounting and unmounting removable storage can be carried out either through the web interface or from the command line.
- Support for sending HTTP requests to transmit events from the notification system to another server has been added. For example, such requests might contain information about synchronized jobs, backup verification, and the deletion of outdated backups. The form of the HTTP request for transmitting event metadata can be configured by the user.
- New modes for change detection have been added, allowing for faster backup operations. Data and metadata of backup snapshots are now separated into different archives, which enables quick identification of files that have changed since the creation of the last backup based on the metadata archive, while excluding unchanged files when creating a new backup.
Source: opennet.ru
