The Proxmox company, known for developing the Proxmox Virtual Environment and Proxmox Mail Gateway products, published the release of the distribution kit Proxmox Backup Server 4.1, which is presented as a ready-made solution for backup and recovery of virtual environments, containers and server content. The installation ISO image is available for free download. Distribution-specific components are licensed under the AGPLv3 license. To install updates, both a paid Enterprise repository and two free repositories are available, which differ in the level of update stabilization.
The system part of the distribution is based on the Debian and OpenZFS package base. The software stack for managing backups is written in Rust and supports incremental backups (only changed data is transferred to the server), deduplication (if there are duplicates, only one copy is stored), compression (using ZSTD), and encryption of backups. The system is designed based on a client-server architecture – Proxmox Backup Server can be used both for working with local backups and as a centralized server for backing up data from different hosts. Provides fast granular restore modes and data synchronization between servers.
Proxmox Backup Server supports integration with the Proxmox VE platform for backing up virtual machines and containers. Management of backup copies and data recovery is carried out via a web interface. It is possible to restrict user access to their data. All transmitted traffic from clients to the server is encrypted using AES-256 in GCM mode, and the backup copies themselves are transmitted already encrypted using asymmetric public key encryption (encryption is performed on the client side, and compromise of the server with backup copies will not lead to data leakage). The integrity of backup copies is controlled using SHA-256 hashes.
