There’s a fine line between a homelab and a production environment, and I think I may have crossed it…
With so many essential services that my family and I use daily hosted
internally, including DNS, media, monitoring, firewalls, and networking,
you name it, having a reliable backup strategy isn’t just a best
practice at my house.
It’s become mission-critical. This week I finally got my Proxmox Backup Server up running, and am now successfully backing up all of my VM workloads. ✅
But it doesn’t stop at just having backups, the real value lies in testing them.
Here’s an effective method I’ve adopted to ensure that my backups will work when I need them most: ➡️ Clone a production VM
➡️ Make a snapshot of the machine
➡️ Make breaking changes to the clone
➡️ Attempt a full restore from backup
➡️ Finally, confirm everything comes back online as expected.
These dry-run validations ensure that snapshots and backups are actually
usable when I need them most, after all discovering they’re incomplete
after a failure is not the time to find out. 😬
Whether you’re running a data-center or hosting a homelab that your household
has come to rely on, do your best to build resilience and verify
recovery methods, before you need them.
Your future self will thank you.
Homelab Proxmox Backups ITInfrastructure SysAdmin DisasterRecovery