Can Veeam Agent for Linux just backup an entire volume, regardless of what's on it?

[Niko-O]

I want to use Veeam Agent for Linux to backup the primary drive of my Proxmox PVE 0.9 NAS. I.e. the drive that holds the Proxmox installation itself, VM configuration, container configuration, VM disks, container disks, etc., but not the HDDs that are served out as network shares by one of the VMs.
I am begrudgingly OK with shutting down all VMs/containers that run on the device, letting Veeam create the backup, and then starting all of the VMs/containers again. I would prefer if I didn't have to do that, but I've seen mention of running VMs/containers causing problems (veeam-agents-for-linux-mac-aix-solaris- ... 37398.html), so if it has to be, then so be it. I could get a similar result by shutting down the entire NAS and cloning the drive with CloneZilla, at the expense of a lot more time, effort and storage, so I'd prefer to use Veeam.

Should Veeam Agent for Linux be able to do that? Should I expect any particular issues (assuming that I shut down the VMs/containers)?

[HannesK]

Hello,
and welcome to the forums.

I personally would not install backup agents on a hypervisor. But assuming that you run a home lab or so, you can try for sure. Volume-based backup exists, but only works for some file systems

If you go with file level backup / no-snap agent, then you can point that to any file system.

Best regards
Hannes
PS: I did not find a Proxmox NAS 0.9 and assume that you use Proxmox 9.0

[Niko-O]

Oh, whoops. Yes, I meant PVE 9.0.
Jep, it's a home "lab".

Hmmm. I assumed that the file system would simply be ext4, but according to lsblk -f, Proxmox creates three partitions: sda1 with no type listed, sda2 is "vfat" and sda3 is "LVM2_member". So if I understand right, this means that snapshots are not possible? And without snapshots, only file-level backup works?
Not sure how much that's "bringing environment-specific issues here". Let me know if it's getting into unwanted territory.

I don't think file-level backup does what I want. I want to be able to boot the recovery media, restore to a fresh SSD and be done. If I understand right, file-level backup would require me to first install Proxmox PVE 9.0 on the fresh drive, then install Veeam on it and then restore the files (and I'm sceptical that that would just work without issues).

I personally would not install backup agents on a hypervisor.

I'm curious. How would you backup a hypervisor? As mentioned before, I could also clone the drive with CloneZilla, but the appeal of Veeam for me is incremental backups (time and space reduction) and minimal effort to create backups.