Recently, we announced that Bareos is working on incremental backups for Proxmox VE virtual machines. The post got a lot of attention.
So we thought it was worth looking at the bigger picture. Why is Proxmox getting so much attention now? Why are more organizations considering it for production environments? And why does incremental backup become more important as your VM environment grows?
Why Proxmox?
Proxmox isn’t new.
The project has been around for many years. What changed is the virtualization market around it.
Since Broadcom acquired VMware, changes to VMware licensing and product packaging made many organizations look at alternatives again. VMware is still a major enterprise virtualization platform and for many companies it remains the right choice. But some users started asking a simple question: do we really need the whole VMware stack for what we are doing?
Proxmox is one of the names that comes up very often. It is open source and combines KVM virtual machines, LXC containers, clustering, storage and web-based management in one platform.
Why incremental backup matters
Running a few VMs is one thing. Running dozens or hundreds of production VMs is different.
A full VM backup needs to process the complete virtual disk again. If you have a 2 TB VM and only 40 GB changed since the previous backup, processing the full 2 TB every time is not very efficient.
This is where incremental backup helps. After the initial full backup, only changed data needs to be processed.
That means less data to read and transfer and usually shorter backup jobs. The benefit becomes more noticeable with larger VMs and frequent backup schedules.
Proxmox backup and mixed environments
Proxmox provides Proxmox Backup Server, which is designed specifically for Proxmox environments and already supports incremental backups.
But many infrastructures are not Proxmox-only. They may also include physical Linux and Windows systems, VMware or Hyper-V, databases and tape.
In this case, it can be useful to manage Proxmox together with the rest of the infrastructure in one backup platform.
Where Bareos fits
Bareos added support for Proxmox VE with Bareos 25. The Proxmox plugin can back up KVM virtual machines and LXC containers without installing a Bareos agent inside every guest. VMs can be restored back to Proxmox or exported as local dump files. With Bareos 25, these are full VM backups.
Incremental Proxmox VM backups are on the roadmap for Bareos 26, expected around November 2026. The new functionality works with changed blocks. After the first full backup, Bareos identifies which blocks have changed and processes only those changes during the next backup. It is the same basic idea Bareos already uses for incremental VM backups with VMware and Microsoft Hyper-V.