I’ve been working in IT for about 6/7 years now and I’ve been selfhosting for about 5. And in all this time, in my work environment or at home, I’ve never bothered about backups.

That really is quite a confession to make, especially in a professional context. But good for you to finally come around!

I can’t really recommend a solution with a GUI but I can tell you a bit about how I backup my homelab. Like you I have a Proxmox cluster with several VMs and a NAS. I’ve mounted some storage from my NAS into Proxmox via NFS. This is where I let Proxmox store backups of all VMs.

On my NAS I use restic to backup to two targets: An offsite NAS which contains full backups and additionally Wasabi S3 for the stuff I really don’t want to lose. I like restic a lot and found it rather easy to use (also coming from borg/borgmatic). It supports many different storage backends and multithreading (looking at you, borg).

I run TrueNAS, so I make use of ZFS Snapshots too. This way I have multiple layers of defense against data loss with varying restore times for different scenarios.

I can’t speak for Proxmox specifically, but Duplicacy works great on my unRAID box and has a fully built out GUI. One of the best solutions I’ve found for my uses so far.

If you are not afraid of Windows: Veeam B/R (Community Edition)

It has a nice GUI and works very well.
GUI is well explained, knowledgebases for Hyper-V, VMware and some others.
The Agent can be deployed manually and linux agents can write to a repository.
I don’t think Proxmox is a supported hypervisor.

Community Edition is free
I think up to 10 workloads

Maybe take a look.

You could try to get hands on a NFR license that has the premium features with a 1 year runtime

Edit: I use Windows Agent for my personal rig and backup via SMB.
We use it at work so I am partially biased to that solution.

You can use syncthing to get files from all of your devices to your central server and then use something like FreeFileSync to backup the entire folder structure to another drive.

It has been a while since I used proxmox, but I seem to recall it having an option to export the VMs on a periodic cadance to an external host built in? That would solve for the configured system backup issue if it still exists. More directly, my preffered method is in keeping the payload objects (photos/files) on a separate dedicated storage NAS with RAID and automatic zfs dataset snapshots to accomodate for both a disk failing and the ‘oh shit, I meant to delete the file not the whole folder!’ type of losses. For a NAS in my case I use xigmanas, which is the predicessor to corenas, fka freenas largely because it doesn’t try to be too fancy, just serve the drives and provide some ancilary services around that job.

So long version short, what particularly are you trying to back up? The pictures or the service hosting them?

For Windows, robocopy on a scheduled task.

For Linux, rsync in cron

And then just copy everything to a share somewhere.

I know you asked for a gui, but these are literally single line commands so it should be very easy to set up.

I use rclone and the gui https://rclone.org/gui/ in my proxmox environment.

That said, the backup itself is still initiated via batch script.

Edit: to backup my PC and all smartphones to my server I use syncthing.

And the rclone backs the data to an cloud system. Some parts encrypted

I’m running Urbackup, runs on my thin client server and backups all windows machines and itself. But is actually seems quite unreliable.

Baculum for Bacula https://www.bacula.lat/baculum/?lang=en

Have you tried Vorta (based on Borg) or Kopia yet? I’m not sure what your exact requirements are but those two have similar featuresets and they’re very easy to use.

I like BackupPC, it’ll do what you want but it may be more challenging to learn than some of these other options.

Good on you to finally get into it, I switched to something systematic only very recently myself (previously it was “copy important stuff to an external HDD whenever I think of it”).

The one thing that I learned (luckily the easy-ish way) is: test your backup. Yes, it’s annoying, but since you rarely (ideally never!) will need to restore the backup it’s incredibly easy to think that everything in your system is working and it either never having worked properly or it somehow started failing at some point.

A backup solution that has never been tested via a full restore of at least something has to be assumed to be broken.

Which reminds me: I have to set up the cron job to periodically test a percentage of all backed up data.

I decided to use Kopia, btw, but can’t really say if that’s well-suited for your goals.

Free and centrally managed, not aware of any but definitely interested in something like that too.

My current setup has Proxmox backing up all LXC and VMs to Synology NAS then the Synology NAS backing up to Backblaze. Both run nightly. Using the built-in backup utility on Proxmox VE pointed at CIFS share on the Synology NAS.

Synology does have a software backup client available but I have never used it. For my desktops & laptops, they are easily reinstalled+reconfigured, I just make sure the data I care about is stored or synchronized to my NAS or the cloud. Nextcloud for files, Firefox sync for history+bookmarks, bitwarden client+vaultwarden for passwords, chezmoi for some dotfiles on some linux systems.

Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I’ve seen in this thread:

6 acronyms in this thread; the most compressed thread commented on today has 7 acronyms.

[Thread #152 for this sub, first seen 20th Sep 2023, 15:35] [FAQ] [Full list] [Contact] [Source code]

BareOS is a great open source option. The GUI is a webUI but you also have a powerful console on the shell if you need to script.