This is a generic to be edited as may be desired.

My initial backup of the entire system, including virtual machines and the proxmox system itself all fitted easily onto a 64 GB USB stick: to my surprise.

Proxmox VM Backup Script

This Bash script creates backups of selected VMs on your Proxmox VE host using vzdump.

Features

Selective VM backup
Gzip compression
Daily timestamped folders
Logs actions to file

Script

“`bash

!/bin/bash

Configuration

BACKUP_DIR=”/mnt/backup/proxmox”

LOG_FILE=”/var/log/proxmox_backup.log”

DATE=$(date +%F)

VM_IDS=(“100” “110” “120”) # Add your VM IDs here

mkdir -p “ $BACKUP_DIR/$ DATE”

echo “=== Starting Proxmox Backup: $DATE ===" >> "$ LOG_FILE”

for VMID in “${VM_IDS[@]}”; do

echo “Backing up VM $VMID..." | tee -a "$ LOG_FILE”

vzdump $VMID \

--mode snapshot \
--compress gzip \
--dumpdir "$BACKUP_DIR/$DATE" \
--mailnotification always \
--mailto root@localhost \
>> "$LOG_FILE" 2>&1

done

echo “=== Backup Completed: $DATE ===" >> "$ LOG_FILE”

Usage

•	Save the script as /usr/local/bin/proxmox_backup.sh
•	Make it executable:

chmod +x /usr/local/bin/proxmox_backup.sh

•	Schedule with cron (crontab -e):

0 2 * * * /usr/local/bin/proxmox_backup.sh

Notes

•	Make sure the target BACKUP_DIR has sufficient space.
•	You can change the backup mode from snapshot to stop or suspend if needed.