Garbage Collection
Garbage Collection (GC) in Proxmox Backup Server (PBS) is a critical maintenance task designed to reclaim storage space by removing unused backup chunks from the datastore.
Scheduling
To preserver resources on the host systems, GC is automatically scheduled by the system in order to prevent excessive resource usage according to the following logic:
- For all datastores on the host, a specific time slot is allocated for GC every 12 hours
- At least every 12 hours a GC job is run
Info
Since the timeslot is dependent on the number of datastores on the host it might shift when datastore count grows/shrinks on the host
Verification
Proxmox Backup Server (PBS) offers built-in verification capabilities to ensure the integrity of backup data.
As with GC jobs, we schedule verification jobs to run every 7 days, since they are strictily not necessary due to the underlying file system being ZFS which has build-in verification.