7MS #725: Building a Bulletproof Backup Solution

Hey friends! Backups are not as cool as pentesting, but boy do they matter when things go sideways. This week I'm sharing how a Proxmox backup disk space meltdown led me to a completely overhauled — and honestly pretty bulletproof — backup setup for both home and work. Claude played a big role in helping me sort it all out.

Here's what we get into:

• The backup history tour — I've been through CrashPlan, Dropbox, Backblaze (which saved my bacon after my house fire in 2019!), and a mystery one that may or may not have had "Panda" in the name. These days I'm settled on ARQ for personal backups — dead simple, backs up to just about everything (Dropbox, OneDrive, Google Drive, even their own ARQ Cloud for ~$80/year), and all data is encrypted at rest. Not a sponsor, but they should be.
• The 3-2-1 rule — I actually asked Siri mid-episode, and she initially thought it was a grounding/anxiety technique. (Valid, I guess?) The real answer: three copies, two different media, one offline. I've got a local copy plus OneDrive, Google Drive, and Dropbox — so I think I'm covered.
• The work side: Proxmox + PBS — My "data center" is a beefy Hetzner Proxmox box with about a dozen VMs. I had Proxmox Backup Server (PBS) set up on a secondary Hetzner box, happily cranking away… until it ran out of disk space and started yelling at me every night.
• Claude to the rescue — I spun up a Claude project, fed it terminal output and retention configs, and it gave me a straight-up honest assessment: either gut your retention policy (risky) or get more disk. It then walked me through Hetzner's auctions page — which I didn't even know existed — to find a storage-heavy, low-horsepower box. Ended up with two mirrored 8TB drives plus a 14TB drive for around $40/month. Not cheap, but totally worth it as a business expense.
• The new setup — PBS is now on its own dedicated Hetzner box. VMs from both my data center and my home NUC Proxmox box back up there nightly. Claude also suggested using that 14TB drive as an SFTP target for ARQ, giving me yet another redundant copy of all my personal data. It'll take a few weeks to fully sync, but I'm running some flavor of the 4-3-2-1 rule now (I made that up).
• Proxmox forever — Someone wrote in asking if I'd go back to ESXi now that Broadcom brought back the free version. Hard no. I've fallen in love with Proxmox and I'm not going back.
• 7MinSec wiki scripts repo — Head over to 7MinSec.wiki and click the Scripts button to find a new GitHub repo where I'm publishing pentesting scripts. First one up: a push-button Exegol installer. More to come — and I'll probably tease new scripts first over at 7MinSec.club on TuesdayTOOLSday!

Have a backup horror story — or a setup you're proud of? Hit us up! And if you need assessments, pentesting, training, or other security goodness, find us at 7MinSec.com.