Proxmox already includes a proper backup tool for your virtual machines — most people simply never switch it on. This guide covers how the built-in backup works, how to schedule it to storage that actually protects you, and the honest point at which the dedicated Proxmox Backup Server becomes worth adding.
Nobody configures backups for fun; they configure them the week after losing something. You can skip that tuition fee. The built-in tool takes ten minutes to schedule, and the only genuinely technical decision in this whole page is where the backups sleep at night — because that address decides whether they survive the failures you bought them for.
Proxmox includes a complete backup tool, vzdump, at no cost. It backs up entire VMs and containers — system, disks and configuration — while they run, using a snapshot so your services do not stop. Select any guest, open its Backup tab, press Backup now, and minutes later you own a single restore file. Restoring is just as direct: select the backup, choose Restore, and the guest comes back as it was — or even as a new guest with a new ID, which is a beautiful way to clone a working setup. For a home lab or a small office, this built-in tool plus a schedule is already 90% of a backup strategy.
Proxmox Backup Server (PBS) is Proxmox's separate, also-free backup product, and it exists for the problems the built-in tool cannot solve. Its headline abilities are incremental backups with deduplication — after the first full backup, only changed blocks travel and are stored, so daily backups of many VMs stop eating terabytes — plus encryption, backup verification, and fast single-file restore browsing. The honest threshold: one host with a handful of VMs is perfectly served by built-in backups to a NAS. Many VMs, long retention, limited backup storage, or a business that must prove restores work — that is PBS territory, ideally running on its own small machine with its own disks.
Whichever tool you choose, the same four rules separate backups from backup-flavoured comfort: backups live on different hardware than the guests; at least one copy is not permanently connected (ransomware encrypts mounted backup shares cheerfully); you have restored one backup for real at least once, so the first restore is not during a crisis; and somebody glances at the job results weekly — a backup that has failed silently for two months is just a story you tell yourself. Snapshots, by the way, are none of this: a snapshot lives inside the same storage as the guest and is a short-term safety net for changes, never a backup.
See the full Proxmox installation and first VM creation, live and step by step.
▶️ Watch Full VideoYes. The default snapshot mode takes a consistent copy without stopping the guest, so services keep running. There are also suspend and stop modes for special cases, but snapshot mode is what almost everyone should use.
Roughly the used size of each guest's disks, compressed — a 40 GB VM that uses 12 GB typically produces a backup in that neighbourhood, per copy kept. This is precisely why retention settings and, eventually, Proxmox Backup Server's deduplication matter.
Yes, it follows the same model as Proxmox VE: free to use with a community repository, with optional paid subscriptions for support and the enterprise repository. Many small setups run it happily without a subscription.