A while ago I wrote about trying out pve-zsync for backing up some Proxmox VE entities. I kept using regular Proxmox backups for the other machines, though: It is a robust way to get recoverable machine backups but it’s not very elegant. For example all backups are full: There’s no logic for managing incremental or differential backups. The last straw was a bug in the Proxmox web interface where these native full backups kept landing on my SSD-backed disk pool which is stupid for two reasons: a) it gave me no on-site protection from disk failures which after user error is the most likely reason to need a backup, and b) it used up valuable space on my most expensive pool. Needless to say, I scrapped that backup solution (and pve-zsync) completely.
My new solution is based entirely on Jim Salter’s excellent tools sanoid and syncoid. Sanoid now gives me hourly ZFS snapshots of all of my virtual machines and containers and of my base system, with timely purging of old snapshots. On my production server, syncoid makes sure these snapshots are cloned to my backup pool, and on my off-site server, syncoid fetches snapshots from the backup pool on the production server to its own backup pool. This means I have a better, cleaner, faster and most importantly working backup solution with considerably less clutter than before: A config file for sanoid and a few cron jobs to trigger syncoid in the right way.