## Why protecting Proxmox data matters

Proxmox includes strong built-in backup capabilities, but backup archives stored
on the same cluster or storage backend as your workloads are not truly
independent. A single failure, misconfiguration, or attack can affect both your
live machines and the backups protecting them.

Common risks in Proxmox environments:

- **Single-cluster exposure**: Backups stored locally or on cluster-attached
  storage share the same failure domain as the machines they protect.
- **No cross-environment portability**: Native Proxmox backups are tightly
  coupled to the cluster that created them, making restoration to a different
  environment difficult.
- **Storage misconfiguration**: Aggressive retention policies or accidental
  deletions can wipe backup archives before they are needed.
- **No integrity verification**: Without cryptographic validation, there is no
  reliable way to confirm a backup is intact until you attempt a restore.

For production workloads, compliance requirements, or multi-cluster
environments, Proxmox needs an independent safety net beyond what vzdump
provides on its own.

## What happens when a Proxmox cluster is compromised?

Proxmox exposes a web UI and REST API that are typically accessible over the
network. If an attacker gains access to a node or the management interface:

- **Total Loss**: Virtual machines and containers can be deleted or overwritten
  through the API. Backup archives stored on the same infrastructure are equally
  exposed.
- **Ransomware Encryption**: Malicious actors can encrypt live machine disks and
  backup archives simultaneously, leaving no clean copy to recover from.
- **No Recovery Path**: Without an independent, immutable backup stored outside
  the cluster, there is no way to recover deleted or encrypted workloads.

Plakar mitigates these risks by storing snapshots in an isolated Kloset,
encrypted end-to-end, and independent of the Proxmox cluster itself. Even if the
cluster is fully compromised, your backups remain intact.

## How Plakar secures your Proxmox workflows

Plakar integrates with Proxmox by wrapping its native vzdump tool. When a backup
runs, vzdump generates the archive as it normally would, and Plakar ingests it
into a snapshot. The result is a standard Proxmox backup with additional
guarantees layered on top.

- **Source Connector**: Back up individual VMs, containers, pools, or entire
  hypervisors into a secure Plakar Kloset, encrypted and deduplicated
  automatically.
- **Destination Connector**: Restore verified snapshots back to any Proxmox
  node, whether the same cluster or a different one, using the native restore
  tools Proxmox already understands.

Plakar supports both local and remote operation:

- **Local mode**: Plakar runs directly on the Proxmox node alongside vzdump.
- **Remote mode**: Plakar runs on a separate backup server and connects to one
  or more Proxmox nodes over SSH, enabling a single instance to manage backups
  across an entire fleet of hypervisors.

This enables backup strategies that go beyond what Proxmox offers natively:

- Store encrypted VM snapshots on object storage such as S3, Scaleway, OVH, or
  Exoscale.
- Deduplicate across machines that share a common base image, storing shared
  data only once.
- Inspect backups at a granular level via the CLI or UI without performing a
  full restore.
- Restore individual VMs from a snapshot that contains multiple machines.
- Archive snapshots to cold storage or export them as portable ptar archives.