Thanks to our amazing community, we’re rolling out our newest software update for Proxmox Backup Server 3.4. Your feedback has been instrumental in shaping these improvements. This version is based on Debian 12.10 ("Bookworm") but uses the Linux kernel 6.8.12-9 as stable default and kernel 6.14...
This is an automated archive made by the Lemmit Bot.

The original was posted on /r/homelab by /u/HTTP_404_NotFound on 2025-04-10 13:38:13+00:00.

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Proxmox Backup Server 3.4

Released: 10 April 2025 Based on: Debian Bookworm (12.10) Kernel: * Latest 6.8.12-9 Kernel (stable default) * Newer 6.14 Kernel (opt-in) ZFS: 2.2.7 (with compatibility patches for Kernel 6.14)

Highlights

  • Performance improvements for garbage collection.
    • Garbage collection frees up storage space by removing unused chunks from the datastore.
    • The marking phase now uses a cache to avoid redundant marking operations.
    • This increases memory consumption but can significantly decrease the runtime of garbage collection.
  • More fine-grained control over backup snapshot selection for sync jobs.
    • Sync jobs are useful for pushing or pulling backup snapshots to or from remote Proxmox Backup Server instances.
    • Group filters already allow selecting which backup groups should be synchronized.
    • Now, it is possible to only synchronize backup snapshots that are encrypted, or only backup snapshots that are verified.
  • Static build of the Proxmox Backup command-line client.
    • Proxmox Backup Server is tightly integrated with Proxmox VE, but its command-line client can also be used outside Proxmox VE.
    • Packages for the command-line client are already provided for hosts running Debian or Debian derivatives.
    • A new statically linked binary increases the compatibility with Linux hosts running other distributions.
    • This makes it easier to use Proxmox Backup Server to create file-level backups of arbitrary Linux hosts.
  • Latest Linux 6.14 kernel available as opt-in kernel.

Changelog Overview

Enhancements in the web interface (GUI)

  • Allow configuring a default realm which will be pre-selected in the login dialog (issue 5379).
  • The prune simulator now allows specifying schedules with both range and step size (issue 6069).
  • Ensure that the prune simulator shows kept backups in the list of backups.
  • Fix an issue where the GUI would not fully load after navigating to the “Prune & GC Jobs” tab in rare cases.
  • Deleting the comment of an API token is now possible.
  • Various smaller improvements to the GUI.
  • Fix some occurrences where translatable strings were split, which made potentially useful context unavailable for translators.

General backend improvements

  • Performance improvements for garbage collection (issue 5331).
    • Garbage collection frees up storage space by removing unused chunks from the datastore.
    • The marking phase now uses an improved chunk iteration logic and a cache to avoid redundant atime updates.
    • This increases memory consumption but can significantly decrease the runtime of garbage collection.
    • The cache capacity can be configured in the datastore’s tuning options.
  • More fine-grained control over backup snapshot selection for sync jobs.
    • Sync jobs are useful for pushing or pulling backup snapshots to or from remote Proxmox Backup Server instances.
    • Group filters already allow selecting which backup groups should be synchronized.
    • Now, it is possible to only synchronize backup snapshots that are encrypted, or only backup snapshots that are verified (issue 6072).
    • The sync job’s transfer-last setting has precedence over the verified-only and encrypted-only filtering.
  • Add a safeguard against filesystems that do not honor atime updates (issue 5982).
    • The first phase of garbage collection marks used chunk files by explicitly updating their atime.
    • If the filesystem backing the chunk store does not honor such atime updates, phase two may delete chunks that are still in use, leading to data loss.
    • Hence, datastore creation and garbage collection now perform an atime update on a test chunk, and report an error if the atime update is not honored.
    • The check is enabled by default and can be disabled in the datastore’s tuning options.
  • Allow to customize the atime cutoff for garbage collection in the datastore’s tuning options.
    • The atime cutoff defaults to 24 hours and 5 minutes, as a safeguard for filesystems that do not always immediately update the atime.
    • However, on filesystems that do immediately update the atime, this can cause unused chunks to be kept for longer than necessary.
    • Hence, allow advanced users to configure a custom atime cutoff in the datastore’s tuning options.
  • Allow to generate a new token secret for an API token via the API and GUI (issue 3887).
  • Revert a check for known but missing chunks when creating a new backup snapshot (reverts fix for issue 5710).
    • This check was introduced in Proxmox Backup Server 3.3 to enable clients to re-send chunks that disappeared.
    • However, the check turned out to not scale well for large setups, as reported by the community.
    • Hence, revert the check and aim for an opt-in or opt-out approach in the future.
  • Ensure proper unmount if the creation of a removable datastore fails.
  • Remove a backup group if its last backup snapshot is removed (issue 3336).
    • Previously, the empty backup group persisted with the previous owner still set.
    • This caused issues when trying to add new snapshots with a different owner to the group.
  • Decouple the locking of backup groups, snapshots, and manifests from the underlying filesystem of the datastore (issue 3935).
    • Lock files are now created on the tmpfs under /run instead of the datastore’s backing filesystem.
    • This can also alleviate issues concerning locking on datastores backed by network filesystems.
  • Ensure that permissions of an API token are deleted when the API token is deleted (issue 4382).
  • Ensure that chunk files are inserted with the correct owner if the process is running as root.
  • Fix an issue where prune jobs would not write a task log in some cases, causing the tasks to be displayed with status “Unknown”.
  • When listing datastores, parse the configuration and check the mount status after the authorization check.
    • This can lead to performance improvements on large setups.
  • Improve the error reporting by including more details (for example the errno) in the description.
  • Ensure that “Wipe Disk” also wipes the GPT header backup at the end of the disk (issue 5946).
  • Ensure that the task status is reported even if logging is disabled using the PBS_LOG environment variable.
  • Fix an issue where proxmox-backup-manager would write log output twice.
  • Fix an issue where a worker task that failed during start would not be cleaned up.
  • Fix a race condition that could cause an incorrect update of the number of current tasks.
  • Increase the locking timeout for the task index file to alleviate issues due to lock contention.
  • Fix an issue where verify jobs would be too eagerly aborted if the manifest update fails.
  • Fix an issue where file descriptors would not be properly closed on daemon reload.
  • Fix an issue where the version of a remote Proxmox Backup Server instance was checked incorrectly.

Client improvements

  • Static build of the Proxmox Backup command-line client (issue 4788).
    • Proxmox Backup Server is tightly integrated with Proxmox VE, but its command-line client can also be used outside Proxmox VE.
    • Packages for the command-line client are already provided for hosts running Debian or Debian derivatives.
    • A new statically linked binary increases compatibility with Linux hosts running other distributions.
    • This makes it easier to interact with Proxmox Backup Server on arbitrary Linux hosts, for example to create or manage file-level host backups.
  • Allow to read passwords from credentials passed down by systemd.
    • Examples are the API token secret for the Proxmox Backup Server, or the password needed to unlock the encryption key.
  • Improvements to the vma-to-pbs tool, which allows importing Proxmox Virtual Machine Archives (VMA) into Proxmox Backup Server:
    • Optionally read the repository or passwords from environment variables, similarly to proxmox-backup-client.
    • Add support for the --version command-line option.
    • Avoid leaving behind zstd, lzop or zcat processes as zombies (issue 5994).
    • Clarify the error message in case the VMA file ends unexpectedly.
    • Mention restrictions for archive names in the documentation and manpage (issue 6185).
  • Improvements to the change detection modes for file-based backups introduced in Proxmox Backup Server 3.3:
    • Fix an issue where the file size was not considered for metadata comparison, which could cause subsequent restores to fail.
    • Fix a race condition that could prevent proper error propagation during a container backup to Proxmox Backup Server.
  • File restore from image-based backups: Switch to blockdev options when preparing drives for the file restore VM.
    • In addition, fix a short-lived regression when using namespaces or encryption due to this change.

Tape backup

  • Allow to increase the number of worker threads for reading chunks during tape backup.
    • On certain setups, this can significantly increase the throughput of tape backups.
  • Add a section on disaster recovery from tape to the documentation (issue 4408).

Installation ISO

  • Raise the minimum root password length from 5 to 8 characters for all installers.
    • This change is done in accordance with current NIST recommendations.
  • Print more user-visible information about the reasons why the automated installation failed.
  • Allow…

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  • TheButtonJustSpins@infosec.pubEnglish
    1·
    3 months ago

    I should probably get this set up at some point. I’ve got Syncthing syncing local backups across three nodes. Works great, but probably this is the smarter approach.