Home Assistant VM Backup Method: Proxmox To NAS & Backblaze B2

Here’s a quick description of another backup methodology for Home Assistant OS that uses a Synology NAS on the network to backup the virtual machine followed by replicating that backup automatically to cloud storage (in this case, B2 by Blackblaze).

What you’ll need

• A Proxmox server/host running your Home Assistant OS as a virtual machine (VM)
• A Synology NAS on your network. This would also work with TrueNAS or UnRAID.
• 10 minutes to configure everything.

1 — Create A Shared Folder On The NAS With NFS

My personal philosophy is to create a separate NAS volume for every major backup project. Although my NAS ends up having a lot of volumes, every backup task has a discrete purpose and source.

For this project, I created a shared folder called HAVMImages:

After creating the volume in DSM, you’ll want to create an NFS permission with read/write privilege:

The hostname/IP can either be a wildcard entry (less secure) or the static local IP of your Proxmox host (more secure).

2 — Add The NAS Volume To Your ‘Datacenter’ In Proxmox

In Proxmox choose Datacenter -> Storage -> Add storage -> NFS

Once you add your NAS by its IP address, the volumes with NFS enabled will automatically populated:

Next, you’ll want to enable VZDump backup file as a content type:

Once that’s done, you have the NAS volume mapped for the backup job.

Set Up The Backup Job In Proxmox

To setup the backup, choose ‘Backup’ under ‘Datacenter’ (first nested level) and click ‘

You’ll want to make sure that you select the HOAS VM you’re backing up, put it on a schedule that suits, and make sure that ‘Storage’ is set to the right path (the one we created on the NAS):

Given that VM images are fairly large, it’s very important to set a retention policy manually. I choose to keep 2 full VM backups (at weekly intervals):

Once you’ve run your first full backup of the VM, you should see that the files have automatically created themselves on the NAS.

The .zst file contains the VM image. Mine was 2.5GB approximately:

Duplicate The Snapshots To Backblaze B2

The final step is to duplicate these snapshots up to a Backblaze B2 bucket.

As preliminary steps you’ll want to create the target bucket and create an app key for the backup job.

After providing the credentials, Cloud Sync will detect your backup target:

Set the local path to be the volume we’re putting the VM snapshots into from Proxmox the remote path as the root folder and choose the sync direction as ‘upload local changes only’:

Finally — to automate the proces — we’ll want to put this job on an automatic schedule. I check for new images to replicate twice a week at 05:00:

And … that’s it!

Your VM backups are now offsited periodically to Backblaze: