A day after releasing Proxmox Virtual Environment 8.4, the company announced the global availability of another offering, Proxmox Backup Server 3.4, which focuses on performance optimization and user-friendly enhancements.
For those unfamiliar with it, Proxmox Backup Server is an enterprise open-source backup and recovery solution that integrates seamlessly with Proxmox Virtual Environment. It allows simple storage configuration and provides tools like deduplication, compression, and encryption for streamlined and secure backups.
Proxmox Backup Server 3.4 employs chunk-based data storage and relies on a garbage collection process to eliminate unused data segments after removing backup snapshots.
It also introduces a caching mechanism that reduces expensive file metadata updates, making GC execution times markedly faster, although memory usage does increase.
In addition, administrators can fine-tune this caching mechanism per datastore, allowing for tailored performance configurations.
Moreover, to strengthen offsite backup strategies, Proxmox Backup Server provides sync jobs that facilitate the transfer of backup snapshots to and from remote instances.
Although group filters previously allowed the selection of entire backup groups, version 3.4 now extends this selection capability to include encrypted or verified snapshots exclusively.
And now to another exciting new feature. There is a new statically linked binary of the command-line client, which further simplifies creating file-level backups on both Proxmox VE and external Linux hosts. In addition, the software can now employ more worker threads when reading chunks during tape backups.
Under the hood, Proxmox Backup Server 3.4 is based on the latest Debian 12.10 (Bookworm), includes the Linux kernel 6.8 by default, and provides ZFS 2.2.7 (with compatibility patches for Kernel 6.14). Administrators requiring support for newer hardware can optionally install Linux kernel 6.14.
For more details, check out the release announcement or the full changelog, which includes a complete list of changes.
The new version is now available for download as an ISO image, which can be quickly installed on bare-metal hardware using an installation wizard. Users of previous versions can easily upgrade via APT, and those running Debian can opt to install the Proxmox Backup Server on top of their existing system.
