Features

Bacula Enterprise Only

This solution is only available for Bacula Enterprise. For subscription inquiries, please reach out to sales@baculasystems.com.

In order to deliver high quality solutions with reduced total cost of ownership, Bacula Enterprise represents the opportunity to do exactly this, by offering a particularly broad range of features. Its two Proxmox modules are just some of these many features.

Bacula has two different plugins for Proxmox. The first is a Proxmox module where FULL backups are supported, and both virtual machines and LXC containers can be backed up very efficiently. The second is a QEMU module, where FULL and INCREMENTAL backups of QEMU virtual machines are supported. DIFFERENTIAL backups are not supported yet. This module does not backup LXC containers.

Both modules provide fast, effective virtual machine bare metal recovery including QEMU and LXC guests.

Detailed list of features of the Proxmox module:

Snapshot-based online backup of any guest VM including QEMU and LXC guests
Full image-level backup
Ability to restore complete virtual machine image
Ability to restore QEMU VM archive (.vma) to an alternate directory
Ability to restore LXC VM archive (.tar) and configuration to an alternate directory
Ability to scan a Proxmox cluster to automatically create a backup configuration for each virtual machine

Proxmox and QEMU Plugins Comparison

The Proxmox and QEMU Plugins both provide backup capabilities for containers and virtual machines running on the Proxmox VE hypervisor. While they share this common purpose, each plugin offers different features. The information below will help you choose the most suitable option for backing up VMs or containers on Proxmox.

If you need to back up a genuine QEMU hypervisor, the Proxmox Plugin cannot be used; in this case, only the QEMU Plugin is supported.

Features	Proxmox Plugin	QEMU Plugin
Supported hypervisor	Proxmox hypervisors	QEMU hypervisors: Proxmox (PVE mode) and Genuine QEMU (QEMU mode)
Virtualization technology	Backup/restore QEMU VMs and LXC guests	Backup/restore only QEMU VMs
API technology used	Proxmox API (Proxmox VE Rest-like API)	QMP (QEMU Machine Protocol) API
Backup level support	Full only	Full/Incremental backups using Block Dirty Bitmap. Differential backups are not supported.
Backup capability	VMs in any state (stopped, running, etc.)	Only running VMs
Disk image format	Backed up disk image is a raw disk	Backed up disk image is a qcow2 disk
Hypervisor storage usage	Does not require space to store the backup before sending it to the Storage Daemon	Requires space to store the backup before sending it to the Storage Daemon

For a complete understanding of each plugin’s capabilities and constraints, it is strongly recommended to review the QEMU and Proxmox Plugins documentation separately, with particular attention to their limitations; see Limitations for Proxmox and Limitations for QEMU.