Proxmox VE

MSP Backups backs up Proxmox VMs and containers at the guest level with Proxmox's own vzdump, streamed through the same encrypted, deduplicated pipeline as files. Backups are portable: a guest can be restored to the host it came from or to any compatible Proxmox host, so you can rebuild after losing a whole cluster.

Install the agent on the host

A Proxmox host runs Debian, so it uses the Linux agent.

1. Install the .deb on the Proxmox host and set the passphrase, as in Linux agent.
2. The host appears in Agents as one device. Its VM and container backups are that device's restore points.
3. Copy the host's /etc/cvn-agent/agent.json somewhere off the cluster and record the passphrase. You need both to restore onto a new host after a disaster.

Back up guests on a schedule

1. In the tenant admin portal, open Backup Sources and add a Proxmox VE source.

2. Assign it to the Proxmox host's device.

3. List the VM and container IDs to include, for example 100, 101, or leave the field blank for every guest on the host.

4. Choose the mode:

   Mode	Effect
   Snapshot	Live, consistent backup of a running guest. The default.
   Suspend	Pauses the guest briefly for the backup.
   Stop	Shuts the guest down for a cold, fully quiesced backup.

5. Save. On each scheduled backup, the agent runs vzdump for each guest and stores one restore point per guest. A failure on one guest is reported and the others carry on.

The agent asks vzdump for an uncompressed stream on purpose. It compresses the data itself, and deduplication works far better on uncompressed data, so unchanged blocks of a disk are not uploaded again.

Back up from the command line

cvn-agent pve-list
cvn-agent pve-backup --config /etc/cvn-agent/agent.json --vmid 100
cvn-agent pve-backup --config /etc/cvn-agent/agent.json --all

pve-backup takes --mode snapshot, suspend or stop.

Restore a guest

cvn-agent pve-restore --config /etc/cvn-agent/agent.json --snapshot latest
cvn-agent pve-restore --config /etc/cvn-agent/agent.json --snapshot <id> --vmid 900 --storage local-lvm

• With no --vmid, the guest is restored under its original ID.
• --storage picks the Proxmox storage for the restored disks.
• --force overwrites an existing guest with the target ID.

List restore points with cvn-agent snapshots --config /etc/cvn-agent/agent.json --json. Guest backups have "kind":"vm".

The restore streams the backup straight into qmrestore for VMs or pct restore for containers, so no full copy is written to local disk first.

For rebuilding on new hardware, see Bare-metal and VM recovery.