Proxmox VE ships everything you need to never lose a VM, and the defaults use almost none of it. Snapshots that live on the same disk as the VM, one-off vzdump archives with no retention plan, and no restore testing is how virtualisation hosts actually get hurt. This guide builds the real strategy in three tiers: what snapshots are actually for, scheduled vzdump done properly (modes, retention, fleecing), and when Proxmox Backup Server's deduplication, verification, and offsite sync become worth a second box.