borgmatic VS ghettoVCB

- for important files, a separate box where I have borgmatic [1] in deduplication mode installed; this is updated once in a while

Just curious: Do you have any reason to believe that such a data corruption bug is likely in ZFS? It seems like saying that ext4 could have a bug and you should also store stuff on NTFS, just in case (which I think does not make sense..).

[1]: https://github.com/borgmatic-collective/borgmatic

Not really dumb. I do use them too but with Borgbackup on the top (since they support it natively).

I found Borgmatic ( https://torsion.org/borgmatic/ ) to be the best way to run my backups. It takes care of everything from pruning to verifying the checksum etc... and it integrates with some monitoring (like cronitor).

So Borgmatic + rsync.net is the best combo

For backups I use Borg myself. If you need a GUI, you can use Vorta or Pika. With borgmatic, there is also a wrapper that extends the range of functions of Borg.

Furthermore, Borgmatic is a wrapper for Borg that extends or improves the range of functions.

For those of you not familiar, borgmatic is a very convenient tool which runs as a wrapper around borg.

I recommend Borg and Borgmatic. Automated, easy to setup, capable of notifying you if anything happens, deduplication and compression makes backups smaller, etc.

To add to this, Borg backup can be a little daunting to configure. There is a wrapper script called Borgmatic that distills it down to a single yaml config file. There are also some cloud hosts like BorgBase and rsync.net with native Borg support.

What are you trying to backup? VMs or the host itself? If host, hypervisors are usually meant to be disposable since you can import config from VMFS and VMX. You can backup configuration files within ESXi just to not redo complicated networking config. If you want to backup VMs, use any 3rd party software (yes, there are no built-in backups). If you are running free ESXi, you are pretty much forced to use agent-based backup or use scripts from Github - https://github.com/lamw/ghettoVCB.

All of the hypervisors you've mentioned (Proxmox, ESXi, XCP-NG) are capable of PCI passthrough, so it really boils down to which one you're comfortable with. ESXi is feature-limited regarding backups (unless you acquire a paid vSphere license or choose to use ghettoVCB).

ghettoVCB ( https://github.com/lamw/ghettoVCB ).

VMware ESXi Free (or vSphere Hypervisor) is a great option, however, it has limitations. The main limitation is that storage api is limited, and you can't use Veeam or alternatives to backup VMs. You can use ghettoVCB with free ESXi. https://github.com/lamw/ghettoVCB

Oh, got it. You can try using GhettoVCB with free ESXi. https://github.com/lamw/ghettoVCB

In case you are planning to use ESXi free, you can use ghettoVCB to backup your VMs. https://github.com/lamw/ghettoVCB

Back up the existing server's configuration and restore on to a new disk. https://kb.vmware.com/s/article/2042141 https://github.com/lamw/ghettoVCB

Veeam has no such option. For ESXi configuration backup you can use ESXi Configuration Backup Tool or GhettoVCB. https://www.vladan.fr/free-esxi-configuration-backup-tool/ https://github.com/lamw/ghettoVCB

Backups - either use Veeam at the OS level or leverage ghettoVCB to do backups from the ESX host itself using snapshots (I use the latter, personally) and replicate them to your backup NAS.