Valnet Pieces About Proxmox Management for Personal Use (Mistakes, Backups, and More

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Oct 18, 2025

• XDA ☛ 4 Proxmox mistakes I made early on that I won't repeat again

  If you discount my AWS app stack and the virtual machines I’d run on TrueNAS, Proxmox was technically the first home server distribution I ever tinkered with. Thanks to its intuitive UI and a rich set of virtualization features, it didn’t take long for Proxmox to drag me down the home lab rabbit hole – and while I’ve cycled between numerous server-oriented platforms since then, my PVE nodes have remained faithfully by my side.

  While the plethora of Proxmox guides, forum posts, and documentation helped me a lot when I was a newcomer to the Proxmox ecosystem, I’ve made my fair share of weird mistakes – ones that I have no intention of repeating.

• XDA ☛ You should use Proxmox Backup Server if you have a PVE home lab

  Ask any tinkerer about the ideal home server platform, and you’ll hear the name Proxmox pop up fairly often in the conversation. Between its LXC support, terrific virtualization performance, cluster capabilities, and low system requirements, Proxmox has a lot of advantages over its rivals. Go deeper into the PVE rabbit hole, and you’ll find an extensive list of features that make Proxmox perfect for advanced home labbers.

  Proxmox Backup Server is one such facility, but rather than shipping natively with PVE, PBS is a separate platform designed to help you manage your VM and LXC snapshots. After using Proxmox Backup Server for well over a year, it has become the sole reason why I don’t need to rebuild my home lab from scratch following a botched server experiment.

• XDA ☛ 4 Proxmox changes I made that delivered 90% of my reliability gains

  Proxmox may have developed a massive following in the home server community, but this virtualization platform is just as powerful for enterprise-grade workloads. After all, Proxmox’s killer performance and KVM support are only a small subset of its features, with its advanced SDN stack, high-availability clusters, and compatibility with automation tools being super useful for business and DevOps-centric tasks.

  Better yet, there are a handful of seemingly complex features that can even aid your casual PVE home lab. Having used Proxmox for a long time, here are the best settings, toggles, and tweaks that made my home server more reliable and foolproof.