A drive in the ZFS pool clicks once and drops out of the mirror. Not a problem, that is what mirrors are for. Then the second drive, purchased on the same day from the same batch, follows it three hours later. Every VM snapshot on that pool is gone at the same time as the VMs themselves, because a snapshot that sits next to the disk it protects is not a backup, it is a rollback point. This is the moment home labbers learn the difference between an afternoon of restore work and a week of rebuilding Home Assistant, Nextcloud, Jellyfin, and the pfSense box that runs the whole house network.
The best backup apps for a Proxmox home lab move data off the node, deduplicate it so a decade of daily images fits on a spare 4 TB drive, encrypt it before it leaves the host, and push a copy to somewhere the fire cannot reach. Proxmox Backup Server no longer needs its own physical box either. TrueNAS Scale can host it as an app or a jail, so one machine can be both the storage target and the backup engine.
What to look for in a home-lab backup app
- Deduplication. VMs share kernels, libraries, and package files. Chunk-level dedup turns a 40 GB Ubuntu image into a few hundred megabytes on the second backup.
- Incremental forever. Full backups every Sunday will fill any drive. Look for change-block tracking or content-defined chunking so only new data crosses the wire.
- Client-side encryption. The backup target should never see plaintext. AES-256 with a key you hold, not the vendor.
- Remote targets. SFTP, S3, B2, Azure Blob, or a plain rsync destination cover 3-2-1. Bonus points for rate limiting so the upstream link stays usable.
- Retention policies. Grandfather-father-son or keep-N-daily/weekly/monthly, pruned automatically with a garbage-collect pass.
- Small resource footprint. A backup client that eats 4 GB of RAM on a Raspberry Pi is not a backup client.
- Restore browser. Mounting a backup as a filesystem to grab one file beats restoring the whole VM to a scratch pool.
Quick comparison
| App | Best for | License | Free plan | Starting price | Dedup |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Proxmox Backup Server | Native Proxmox VM and CT backups | AGPLv3 | Full features | Free (support from €110/yr) | Yes |
| Kopia | Cross-platform files with a GUI | Apache 2.0 | Full features | Free | Yes |
| Restic | Scripted headless snapshots | BSD-2 | Full features | Free | Yes |
| Veeam B&R Community | Windows shops with a few hosts | Proprietary | 10 workloads | Free | Yes |
| BorgBackup | Deterministic Linux server backups | BSD | Full features | Free | Yes |
| Duplicati | Users who want a web UI | MIT | Full features | Free | Yes |
| rclone | Sync to any cloud object store | MIT | Full features | Free | No (uses server-side copy) |
| Bacula | Multi-site, tape, enterprise policies | AGPLv3 / Proprietary | Community edition | Enterprise from ~€500/yr | Yes |
The apps
1. Proxmox Backup Server
The obvious answer, and the correct one for anyone whose primary target is a Proxmox VE cluster. PBS talks directly to the hypervisor, uses dirty-bitmap change tracking so incrementals take seconds, chunks and deduplicates at 4 MB granularity, and encrypts client-side with a key that never leaves the source. Restores are file-level, disk-level, or full-VM, and a live-restore lets a downed guest boot from the backup while the disk copies back.
Weaknesses: the web UI is functional rather than pretty, and it only speaks Proxmox natively. Backing up Windows desktops means the separate PBS client, which is a CLI.
Pricing: free and open-source under AGPLv3. Optional support subscriptions from about €110/year per socket.
Platforms: Linux (server), Linux and Windows (client) Download: Proxmox Backup Server
Bottom line: if the workload is Proxmox, start here and only look elsewhere when a specific gap forces the move.
2. Kopia
Kopia is the tool people reach for when they want PBS-style dedup and encryption but need to protect laptops, NAS shares, and one-off Linux boxes alongside the VMs. It ships a GUI, a web UI, and a CLI that all speak the same repository format, and it targets S3, B2, Azure, GCS, WebDAV, SFTP, and local disk without extra plugins.
Weaknesses: repository maintenance (compaction, garbage collection) needs a scheduled task, and multi-client concurrent writes to the same repo can conflict if the schedule is sloppy.
Pricing: free and open-source under Apache 2.0.
Platforms: Linux, Windows, macOS, FreeBSD Download: Kopia
Bottom line: the best free general-purpose backup client of the last few years, and a strong companion to PBS for everything that is not a Proxmox guest.
3. Restic
Restic is a single Go binary with no daemon, no database, and no GUI. Repositories are content-addressed, chunked, encrypted, and portable across every supported backend (local, SFTP, REST, S3, B2, Azure, GCS, Swift, rclone). It is the tool of choice for people who run backups from cron or systemd timers and want the pipeline to be scriptable end to end.
Weaknesses: prune passes on large repositories are slow compared with Borg or Kopia, and the lack of a GUI puts it out of reach for household users who need to trigger a restore themselves.
Pricing: free and open-source under BSD-2.
Platforms: Linux, Windows, macOS, BSD Download: Restic
Bottom line: if the backup runbook is a shell script, restic is the smallest, most predictable engine to put under it.
4. Veeam Backup & Replication Community
Veeam is the incumbent in the Windows and VMware world, and the Community edition is a real product rather than a crippled demo. It covers up to 10 instances (VMs, physical servers, cloud VMs, or workstations) with the same engine that runs in enterprise deployments, including application-aware processing, instant recovery, and a mature restore UI.
Weaknesses: the management console runs on Windows only, and Proxmox is not a first-class hypervisor target. Backing up Proxmox guests works through the agent installed inside each VM rather than through the hypervisor API.
Pricing: free for 10 workloads. Paid tiers start north of €800/socket for the full Backup & Replication product.
Platforms: Windows (server), Linux, Windows, macOS, and mobile (agents) Download: Veeam Backup & Replication Community
Bottom line: worth the seat if the lab is Windows-heavy or a stepping stone toward a work environment that already runs Veeam.
5. BorgBackup
Borg is the workhorse behind a decade of successful home-server backups. It deduplicates with a rolling-hash chunker, encrypts with authenticated AES-256-CTR, compresses with lz4 or zstd, and mounts any archive as a FUSE filesystem so a single file is a cp away. Push mode uses SSH to a plain Linux target running the borg binary, which is as portable as backup targets get.
Weaknesses: a single repository is locked to one writer at a time, so protecting many machines means many repositories or a wrapper like Borgmatic to serialize jobs.
Pricing: free and open-source under BSD.
Platforms: Linux, macOS, FreeBSD, Windows (via WSL) Download: BorgBackup
Bottom line: still the most trustworthy CLI dedup engine for Linux-to-Linux backups over SSH.
6. Duplicati
Duplicati fills the gap for households and small offices that want a proper web UI, a scheduler, and a wide catalogue of cloud backends without touching a config file. It handles AES-256 encryption, block-based dedup, and incremental uploads to 30+ storage providers, and it runs as a background service on every desktop OS.
Weaknesses: the 2.x line has spent years in beta, and while the current builds are stable, restores from corrupted or interrupted backup sets can be slow to repair.
Pricing: free and open-source under MIT. A paid support tier is available through the company behind the project.
Platforms: Linux, Windows, macOS Download: Duplicati
Bottom line: the friendliest option when the person who has to hit “restore” is not the same person who set up the backup.
7. rclone
rclone is not a traditional backup tool, but paired with a snapshot-capable source (ZFS, btrfs, or a Restic/Kopia repo) it becomes the cheapest way to push a copy off-site. It speaks 70+ storage backends, supports server-side copy where the provider allows it, and does bandwidth limiting, checksums, and encryption on top of buckets that would otherwise be opaque.
Weaknesses: no dedup, no snapshot semantics of its own. Sync in the wrong direction with --delete and yesterday’s data is gone from both sides.
Pricing: free and open-source under MIT.
Platforms: Linux, Windows, macOS, BSD, Android Download: rclone
Bottom line: the plumbing that gets local backups to Backblaze B2, Cloudflare R2, or Wasabi for a few euros a month.
8. Bacula
Bacula is the answer when the lab has grown past a single site, needs tape support, or wants full-blown catalog-driven policies across dozens of clients. The Community edition covers file-level backups, deduplication (via the aligned volumes plugin), encryption, and every storage device Linux can address, including LTO tape libraries.
Weaknesses: configuration is done in text files with a nontrivial learning curve, and the friendlier UI (Bacula Web or the commercial BWeb) is a separate install.
Pricing: Community edition is free under AGPLv3. Bacula Enterprise starts around €500/year for a small-scale subscription.
Platforms: Linux (director/storage), Linux, Windows, macOS, BSD (clients) Download: Bacula
Bottom line: overkill for a two-node cluster, appropriate the moment tape, multi-site retention, or granular per-client policies enter the picture.
How to pick the right one
Match the tool to the workload, not the other way around.
- All-in-one Proxmox lab: Proxmox Backup Server on TrueNAS Scale or a small NUC, dedup enabled, garbage-collect on Sunday. Restores are instant, encryption is one checkbox.
- Cross-platform files (laptops, NAS shares, one-off Linux VMs): Kopia. One repository per machine on the same S3 or SFTP target, scheduled from the GUI, restored the same way.
- Scripted, headless, minimal moving parts: Restic. Systemd timer, JSON output, alerts through the monitoring stack already in place.
- Cloud-first with cheap object storage: rclone in front of Restic or Kopia, targeting Backblaze B2 or Cloudflare R2 for the off-site copy in a 3-2-1 rotation.
- Enterprise scale, tape, or multi-site policies: Bacula for open-source, Veeam for a friendlier UI and Windows-first shops.
Everything else is a variation on those five patterns.
FAQ
Does Proxmox Backup Server run on TrueNAS Scale?
Yes. TrueNAS Scale ships PBS as a community app in the catalogue, and it can also run in a sandbox jail or in a VM on the same box. The dataset that holds the datastore should be a dedicated one with atime=off and compression=lz4 for the best throughput.
Is Restic faster than Borg in 2026? For backup runs, they are within a few percent of each other on the same hardware. For prune and check operations on repositories over a terabyte, Borg is still measurably faster because its chunker index sits in memory. Restic 0.17 closed most of the gap on backup speed, and either one saturates a gigabit link long before it saturates the source disks.
Does a home lab need dedicated backup hardware? No. A single spare SSD or a used NAS is enough for the local copy. Dedicated hardware becomes useful when the backup workload starts to compete with the primary storage for IOPS, which happens around the point a lab crosses 5 TB of protected data or 20 VMs.
Can Veeam Community back up Proxmox VMs? Not through the hypervisor API. The Veeam Agent for Linux or Windows installs inside each guest and backs it up as a physical machine, which counts against the 10-workload limit. It works, but PBS is the better tool for anyone whose primary hypervisor is Proxmox.
What is the best setup for a 3-2-1 off-site copy? Two copies locally (the live VM on the Proxmox host and a PBS or Kopia backup on a second drive or NAS) plus one off-site copy pushed with rclone to Backblaze B2, Cloudflare R2, or Wasabi. The off-site leg costs a few euros a month for a home-lab-sized dataset and survives the fire, the burglary, and the ransomware event that takes the LAN with it.
