Understanding Proxmox Backup Server

I use a NAS currently as my storage for my Proxmox VE backups. And it has been really well as far as the use case goes. I've used it many times to revert the VMs and containers. However I was curious about what additional features can I gain from trying the PBS.

My first attempt was to install it as an LXC container, but somehow it failed to install as a package and I could not get it work even after diving into the forums. So I switched to installing via ISO as a VM. And this time it worked correctly. I passed through a USB HDD to test how it works with external and internal storage as well.

At a glance, while it looks like a great tool, not much is going on really until you're managing a big cluster and need to browse backups. I basically configured both clusters to do backup here.

I configured the USB HDD as a datastore. And this can be seen as a configuration here.

Selecting the Backups Datastore gives us this new screen.

We can also explore the backup contents as well! This is indeed novel and specific to PBS AFAIK.

You can dive in deeper into the filesystems of containers as well! Really a great feature, except I've a rare use for this, if at all.

Another additional feature was that we get a detailed log for backup while LXC containers are being backed up. This is usually not the case for normal NAS based backup storage even while using the PVE portal.