Proxmox Backup Server Setup: A Homelab Tutorial

Deduplicated nightly backups of every VM and container, in four steps, plus the restore test most people skip.

By Brandon Sheley · Updated Oct 19, 2026

Short answer: install Proxmox Backup Server on a separate machine from the ISO, create a datastore with prune, garbage collection and verify schedules, add it to Proxmox VE under Datacenter → Storage with its fingerprint, then schedule nightly backups and test a restore. Keep a second copy off-site with a sync job.

The steps and requirements below follow Proxmox's own PBS documentation for the current 4.x release, trimmed to what a homelab actually needs.

Where to Run It (Not on the Thing It Backs Up)

Proxmox recommends a separate physical machine for PBS, so your backups survive the hypervisor dying. It can be installed on a Proxmox VE host, but the docs say that's not recommended, for exactly that reason. For a homelab, the realistic options are:

• An old mini PC or desktop with big disks. The best fit. A used business PC with a couple of large hard drives is plenty for a home cluster.
• A VM on a different machine, like a NAS that can run VMs, with the datastore on that machine's storage.
• A VM in the same cluster, as a stopgap, with its datastore on storage outside the cluster and a sync job copying it somewhere else. Better than nothing, not a final answer.

Sizing from the PBS docs: a 64-bit CPU with at least 4 cores, at least 4GiB of RAM plus roughly 1GiB per TiB of backup storage, and 32GiB for the OS. Backups are lots of small random reads and writes, so SSDs are ideal; if you use hard drives, the docs strongly recommend an SSD metadata cache, such as a mirrored ZFS special device. Current drive prices are on the disk tracker.

Step 2: Create a Datastore and Set Retention

A datastore is the folder (or ZFS dataset) where backups live. Mount the backup disk first, then create it with Add Datastore in the sidebar, or from the shell:

proxmox-backup-manager datastore create store1 /mnt/datastore/store1

When you create it, set three schedules:

• Prune decides which backups to keep, such as keep-last 3, keep-daily 7, keep-weekly 4, keep-monthly 6.
• Garbage collection actually frees the disk space. Pruning only removes backup snapshots from the index; the chunks they used are deleted by the next GC run, so schedule GC to run regularly (weekly is fine at home).
• Verify re-checks backups against their checksums. Add a verify job, too; weekly or monthly is typical.

Then create a dedicated user for Proxmox VE (Configuration → Access Control), for example backup@pbs, and give it the DatastoreBackup role on this datastore only, rather than using root.

Step 4: Schedule Backups and Test a Restore

Under Datacenter → Backup → Add, pick the PBS storage, a schedule (nightly is typical), which guests to include, and Snapshot mode so guests keep running during the backup. Leave retention to the datastore's prune settings.

Then restore something. Restore one VM to a new ID, boot it, and delete it. Try a file-level restore from a container, too. A backup you haven't restored isn't one you know works.

Finally, get a copy off-site. A second PBS somewhere else can pull your datastore with a sync job, or a PBS 4.x datastore can sit on S3-compatible object storage (watch the provider's storage, request and egress costs). One local copy plus one off-site copy covers most of what can go wrong at home.