Backing up VMs and Snapshots

It is important to create backups for your VMs. Proxmox does this a bit differently then what we learned with in Type-2 Hypervisors. 

To create a backup in Proxmox do the following:

1. Select your VM

2. Navigate toe Backup

3. Click "Backup now"

4. In the new window:

   1. Select the location (Storage) to save the backup

   2. Select the Mode:

      1. Snapshot: Provides low downtime, but can have some inconsistency risk. This does a live backup of the running VM.

      2. Suspend: This is provided for improving compatibility. This suspends the VM before taking a snapshot.  This increases downtime due to  suspending the VM. Not recommended. 

      3. Stop: Provides the highest level of consistency and compatibility. The VM is shutdown and then the VM is backed up. Once the backup process has started the VM can resume full operational mode again (if it was running when the backup process was started). 

   3. Select your compression (I recommend staying with ZSTD)

   4. Complete the Notes section as needed.

   5. Click "Backup"

5. Keep in mind that depending on where you saved the backup you might need to download it. You can use SFTP to connect to your Proxmox Server and download it or use scp on the Proxmox CLI to copy the file to a backup location.