So I have been running a proxmox server for a few month now, just playing with it a bit blindly. Just recently bough another drive and reading the storage docs I got some question how does everyone else do things… now I’m planning a backup strategy and want to know what are good practices to manage my VMs/LXC and storage in general.

I currently have:

• 250G SSD shared between host and VMs/LXC
• 4TB HDD in RAID1 (ZFS)
• 8TB HDD as LVM

I normally create VMs with 30G base storage in the SSD and add another virtual hard drive to the VM from the HDDs to create a LVM inside the VMs to store data. Is that good enough? Would I have bad performance creating the VMs in the HDDs?

When creating a snapshot I see this warning below:

WARNING: Sum of all thin volume sizes (438.00 GiB) exceeds the size of thin pool pve/data and the size of whole volume group (<223.07 GiB).

That got me wondering:

• How should I store snapshots in another drive? In the ZFS? Would cause issues if I delete old snapshots?
• What about backups for the VMs? I’d like to have automatic weekly backups but how should I plan this?
• Also I’m not sure if the 8TB is ok as LVM or should be LVM-thin or directory?

If you know any proxmox storage management guide for newbies please share, any advice is greatly appreciated.

Thanks for reading.