Proxmox VE hosts¶

This backs up the node's config, not your guests. vzdump to PBS already handles guests. This covers everything you'd otherwise rebuild by hand after a dead boot disk.

Setup¶

Install fallbck-agent on the PVE node. On its next heartbeat it reports itself as a PVE host. Then create a Proxmox VE host job in onboarding.

What's in the snapshot¶

Each run writes one pve.pxar into the group host/<hostname>-pve:

• /etc, with /etc/pve copied out of the cluster filesystem and a consistent copy of config.db
• /root
• installed and manually-selected package lists
• pvesh dumps of storage, network and node status, and pvesm status
• LVM / ZFS / blkid / lsblk inventories, and every disk's partition table (sgdisk --backup)
• guest configs, parsed for the run detail page

Data paths are optional: mounted storages like /var/lib/vz, archived file by file. Guest disk images under them (images/, private/, subvol-*) are skipped unless the job says otherwise. Guest disks are never part of this backup.

Restore¶

Restore onto a fresh install of the same PVE major version. Pull the archive with PBS's client and run the generated runbook that's inside it:

eval "$(fallbck-ctl targets credentials pbs-main)"     # sets PBS_REPOSITORY / PBS_PASSWORD / PBS_FINGERPRINT
proxmox-backup-client restore host/pve01-pve/2026-09-11T02:00:00Z pve.pxar /var/tmp/fallbck-pve-restore
bash /var/tmp/fallbck-pve-restore/collect/fallbck-pve-restore.sh --dry-run
bash /var/tmp/fallbck-pve-restore/collect/fallbck-pve-restore.sh --yes    # add --data for the data paths too

The script:

1. reinstalls the manually selected packages (it never downgrades)
2. stops the PVE services
3. restores the cluster config from config.db (or file by file through pmxcfs -l)
4. restores identity, network, apt, SSH host keys, cron and PVE settings from the archived /etc
5. restarts everything and checks with pvesh get /version

The run detail page has a summary of the runbook too. fallbck-ctl targets credentials gets logged on the server, because it hands out the PBS token.