I break my Proxmox home lab on purpose to find out whether my snapshots would actually bring it back

Published Sep 11, 2026, 1:30 PM EDT Ayush Pande is a PC hardware and gaming writer. When he's not working on a new article, you can find him with his head stuck inside a PC or tinkering with a server operating system. Besides computing, his interests include spending hours in long RPGs, yelling at his friends in co-op games, and practicing guitar. The importance of creating regular snapshots and backups is something fledgling tinkerers hear time and again when they embark on their home lab journey. However, realizing why veterans stress on setting up automatic backups only after a catastrophic failure is a rite of passage for every home labber. I’m no exception to this rule, and losing my painstakingly-crafted Proxmox node to a faulty SSD is what made me create a 3-2-1 snapshot sync pipeline for my PVE servers. But aside from keeping tabs on my snapshot tasks every once in a while, I often run dummy recovery operations on my virtual guests just to confirm whether they’re working. In fact, I sometimes execute wild automation workflows, storage tweaks, and network modifications on my virtual guests to ensure they’re recoverable. But only after taking the necessary precautions, of course. Snapshots can fail big time if you don’t test them Over time, your old snapshots can be rendered ineffective With the way many folks (including yours truly) talk about snapshots, you might be tempted to believe that they’re the be-all-and-end-all solution to data loss. And to some extent, that’s true. But only if they’re in tip-top working order. Having had a few snapshots not only fail due to interrupted operations but also remain undetected for weeks, I can confirm that it’s entirely possible to lose them if you’re not careful. Worse still, storage drives are still vulnerable to corruption in general, and even with a separate Proxmox Backup Server responsible for housing snapshots, it’s entirely possible for some of the older snapshot revisions to become unrecoverable. While I haven’t had this happen to me yet, I’ve even heard about server enthusiasts ending up with indexing errors and damaged ZFS blocks over longer periods – both of which can render snapshots useless. Combine that with plain bad luck in the form of dead hard drives, and you can see why I’m so cautious about ensuring my snapshots remain in working order. I often test wacky experiments on my virtual guests just so I can test the snapshot integrity But I only do it after the verification jobs give me the A-OK Proxmox Backup Server is responsible for accepting snapshots from my PVE nodes, and its ability to run verification tasks on my virtual guests is one of the many reasons why I adore this companion service. You see, PBS splits my snapshots into chunks and calculates unique checksums for them before saving everything within my datastore. If data corruption or other inconsistencies target my snapshots, the checksum values associated with them get altered, and that’s where verification jobs come into the equation. Verification tasks recompute these checksums and compare them with the original values, and in case of any differences, flag the affected snapshots. I’ve scheduled them on a weekly basis on my local PBS instance and bi-monthly (fortnightly?) on its remote counterpart, so I get notified of any inconsistencies in my snapshots before they become completely inaccessible. And once my snapshot verification is successful, I sometimes go back to the virtual machine and try to recover them even when they’re perfectly operational… My experiments range from simulating network errors to running wacky automation scripts Despite the utility of snapshot verification jobs, I still can’t be certain whether my OS services, packages, or settings will work as expected post recovery. Perhaps my virtual guests have missing drivers, package conflicts, misconfigured kernel settings, or other functional errors that can’t be verified by PBS. So, I occasionally simulate recovery drills on essential virtual guests just to ensure they’ll run correctly post restoration. For example, I’d sometimes tinker with the network settings – and not even to render it usable, but to gauge if my recovery tasks would be able to apply the right configs. Other times, I’d randomly delete non-essential files, then attempt to restore them via the snapshots. PBS actually makes these tests a lot easier thanks to its selective restoration functionality, so I can hop back into the VMs or LXCs once I’m done verifying the integrity of their backups. Alternatively, for non-mission critical virtual guests, I’d go for more complex experiments. Overwriting certain sectors of my virtual disk, tweaking the disk UUIDs in the /etc/fstab file, or breaking the sudoers file are by far the most common methods for breaking my virtual guests, but I’d only run them once the verification tasks don’t return any errors. I’d also mess around with the GRUB settings on purpose, especially since doing so gives me better insight into the bootloader configurations. On the flip side, I’d sometimes run unverified Terraform tasks on a virtual guest – partly to train my automation skills, and also to check what my randomly concocted Playbook snippets can do to an LXC or VM. That said, I still leave the security settings untouched, as I don't want to expose my home lab to all the malware floating around on the Internet. Proxmox Proxmox is an open-source platform built on Debian Linux designed for server virtualization.