As of Proxmox VE 5.0, there are two backup options included out of the box:
- Full backup: This backs up the entire virtual machine
- Snapshots: This freezes the state of a VM at a point in time
Proxmox 5.0 can only do a full backup and cannot do any granular file backup from inside a virtual machine. Proxmox also does not use any backup agents for guest VMs.
A full backup is a complete, compressed backup of a virtual machine, including its configuration file. We can take this backup and restore it locally to the same cluster or to an entirely different Proxmox cluster. We can potentially set up a full backup every day, or on a different schedule of up to one week. Since a full backup commits the complete backup of the entire virtual machine, including all the virtual disk images in it, it is the slowest backup option. It is also the safest, since the final backup file is not dependent on the original VM. Two of the most important components of a full backup are...
