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

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.