Case study: how MyRemoteMac backs up the platform behind 800 dedicated Macs

Customer	MyRemoteMac, dedicated Mac mini and Mac Pro hosting for CI/CD and Apple development
Environment	About 80 administration VMs on a 5-node Proxmox VE cluster, supporting around 800 physical Macs
Protected data	50 TB, daily backups, 6-month retention
Cloud-PBS services	Managed Proxmox Backup Server, client-side encryption, offline backup copy, weekly restore verification
Results	Full VM restore in about 3 minutes, latency under 10 ms, more than 10 Gbps during backup windows

The customer

MyRemoteMac rents dedicated, physical Mac mini and Mac Pro servers to developers and engineering teams, for CI/CD pipelines, Xcode builds and other macOS-only workloads. Each machine is real Apple Silicon hardware allocated to a single customer, hosted in a datacenter in France. Around 800 of them are in service today.

macOS is never virtualized there: the Macs are physical. What is virtualized is everything around them. Supervision, provisioning and administration tools, and the virtual firewalls that protect customer machines run as about 80 VMs on a 5-node Proxmox VE cluster.

None of these VMs serves a customer directly. But if they go down, new Macs can no longer be provisioned, alerting goes silent and the firewalls protecting the fleet are exposed. For MyRemoteMac, this administration layer is as critical as any production system.

The challenge: off-site backups without a second datacenter

MyRemoteMac had three requirements.

Backups had to leave the building. Keeping them in the same datacenter as the cluster would not survive the loss of that datacenter. But renting a second site only to store backups, with its hardware, remote hands, network and maintenance, was a cost the team could not justify.

Native backups of whole VMs. Full VM images through Proxmox’s own mechanism, rather than an agent to deploy and monitor inside each of the 80 guests.

No backup stack to operate. MyRemoteMac’s business is running Macs. Patching, monitoring and scaling a backup server is exactly the kind of work they advise their own customers to hand off.

The team weighed the usual options. A commercial suite such as Veeam meant another product to license and run, when Proxmox already ships Proxmox Backup Server. Self-hosting PBS off-site solved the technical question but brought back the second datacenter. Object storage fed by vzdump scripts gave up deduplication and granular restores, and left the scripting to them. A managed Proxmox Backup Server met all three requirements.

What was set up

A Cloud-PBS instance is added in Proxmox VE as a native PBS storage: nothing to install on the hypervisors, and backup jobs behave exactly as they would against a local PBS.

• Daily backups of all 80 VMs, kept for 6 months. About 50 TB is protected, and PBS deduplication keeps the stored volume in check.
• Client-side encryption. Backups are encrypted on MyRemoteMac’s cluster before they leave it, and the keys stay on their side. For a hosting provider, this was a precondition.
• An offline backup copy, managed by Cloud-PBS, to complete a 3-2-1 strategy without any action on their side.
• Weekly restore verification. Every week, a backup is actually restored and booted on isolated hardware, and a report records the result. The team does not have to assume its backups work: it has the evidence.

The restore, tested for real

What matters most to MyRemoteMac is not how fast backups run, but how fast service comes back. In their drills, a full VM restore completes in about 3 minutes, which keeps the recovery time for any single administration VM under 5 minutes. With daily backups, the recovery point is at most 24 hours: an acceptable trade-off for a layer whose configuration can largely be rebuilt, and one that can be tightened by backing up more often.

That preparation was tested for real. One night, a hypervisor node failed and part of the VMs it hosted were corrupted. MyRemoteMac opened an urgent ticket, the Cloud-PBS team followed the incident with them, and the affected VMs were restored from the datastore onto a replacement node. The administration layer was back in service the same night. Because restores had been rehearsed and verified every week, losing a node became a planned procedure rather than a crisis.

Both sites are in France: MyRemoteMac measures latency under 10 ms and sustains more than 10 Gbps during backup windows. In practice, the off-site copy performs like a local one.

“We run 800 physical Macs; the last thing we wanted was to also run a backup datacenter. Cloud-PBS gives us native Proxmox backups, offline copies and weekly proof that our restores actually work, for less than the cost of a rack we would have had to maintain ourselves.”

Guénolé, founder, MyRemoteMac

What’s next

MyRemoteMac is now looking at extending the same approach beyond its administration layer, including backup options for its customers’ Mac instances.

To protect your own Proxmox VE cluster the same way, see managed Proxmox Backup Server and restore verification.