Proxmox Backup Server -- Daily backup verification are overkill?

Proxmox
1

Hi everyone,

I’m using Proxmox Backup Server (PBS) with ZFS for the datastore backend and wanted to gather your thoughts on the recommended backup verification strategy.

According to the official PBS documentation (link), it’s advised to verify all backups regularly (hourly/daily). However, this can be quite resource-intensive, especially as the dataset grows. Since ZFS already offers checksumming and bit-rot detection, I’m wondering:

Is it overkill to verify all backups as often as possible if you’re using ZFS underneath?

Would it be more reasonable to:

  • Rely on regular zpool scrub and only verify backups occasionally?
  • Verify a subset of backups daily/weekly instead of all of them?
  • Focus verification more on older backups (more at risk of silent corruption) than recent ones?

I’d love to hear how others in the ZFS/PBS community approach this.
What’s your routine, and how do you balance confidence in backup integrity with system load?

Thanks in advance!

2

If proxmox is doing backups “the zfs way”, there is no silent corruption if scrubs are happy. You need to look up how proxmox is doing it’s backups if you told it zfs is the datastore backend. If they use other tools (e.g. rsync) instead of native zfs send|recv, then you need to do more than scrub.

Other’s, correct me if I’m wrong.