If you are running Proxmox VE for your infrastructure or homelab, relying on standard tarball backups to an NFS share is incredibly inefficient. Enter Proxmox Backup Server (PBS).

Why PBS Changes the Game

PBS offers features that make it the ultimate choice for VM and LXC backups:

• Deduplication: PBS analyzes data blocks across all your backups. If you have 10 Ubuntu VMs, the core OS files are only stored on disk once, drastically reducing storage requirements.
• Incremental Backups: After the initial full backup, PBS only transfers the exact blocks of data that have changed since the last backup. A 50GB VM might only take seconds to backup.
• Ransomware Protection: With fine-grained access control and tape backup support, you can easily create immutable, air-gapped backups.

Deploying PBS on a separate physical host or VM is the single most important step you can take to secure your Proxmox cluster.