Never Lose Your Data: A Homelabber's Backup Playbook for Proxmox, Home Assistant and OPNsense

Your homelab is one bad update, one mistyped command or one dead disk away from losing the photos, the automations and the firewall rules you spent months on.

Never Lose Your Data is the backup setup I run at home for a Proxmox cluster with OPNsense and Home Assistant, written as one playbook rather than a tool survey. It starts with the 3-2-1 rule done honestly (RAID, snapshots and sync folders are not backups) and a one-page inventory that exposes the holes. Then vzdump the right way, Proxmox Backup Server with encryption, retention numbers that survive a month of failed jobs, an off-site copy on Backblaze B2 through rclone or a friend's PBS over Tailscale, and application backups for Home Assistant, OPNsense and the databases inside your guests.

The quarterly restore drill proves it works; the backup, verify, then destroy routine lets you delete old guests without regret; and the monitoring chapter catches the job that quietly stopped running. Every chapter: the trap, the fix, a checklist.

What you get

• Backups that cover every guest by default, with retention set in one place
• Proxmox Backup Server set up properly: its own box, client-side encryption, prune, GC and verify jobs
• An off-site copy that keeps working: rclone + crypt to Backblaze B2, or a PBS push sync to a friend over Tailscale
• A four-step quarterly restore drill with a log, plus Home Assistant and OPNsense restores onto fresh VMs
• Alerts for the failures nobody sees: notification matchers, a dead-man switch, a weekly backup-age report
• The Weekend Backup Checklist and a one-page command cheat sheet

41 pages, PDF and EPUB. Book 3 in the Homelab the Right Way series; it stands on its own.