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30-day lab plan · 🗄️ Backup & Storage Engineer

Become job-ready as abackup & storage engineer in 30 days.

One focused task a day, four weeks, ending with a portfolio and a mock interview. Built for students and engineers in India who learn by doing — about 2 hours a day on weekdays, a little more on weekends.

What you needInterview questions →Role path →
Your kit

Set up before day 1

Two Proxmox VMs (or nodes), Proxmox Backup Server, TrueNAS, and our ZFS/RAID calculator and backup planner. Everything here is free or has a free tier; a laptop with 16 GB RAM is enough for most labs (32 GB for nested clusters).

  • Daily ruleFinish the task, write 5 lines of notes, commit to Git. Notes become your interview stories.
  • Weekend ruleDay 7 of each week is a review: redo the hardest task from memory.
  • Stuck rule30 minutes max, then ask in a community or our engineer network.
Week 1

Storage basics

  1. Day 1Install TrueNAS; create a ZFS pool (mirror) and dataset
  2. Day 2RAID levels: model capacities with our ZFS/RAID calculator
  3. Day 3NFS and SMB shares; mount from Linux and Windows
  4. Day 4iSCSI target → Proxmox LVM; create a VM on it
  5. Day 5Snapshots on ZFS: take, roll back, clone
  6. Day 6ZFS send/receive replication to a second dataset
  7. Day 7Review: document your storage layout and performance numbers (fio)
Week 2

Backups

  1. Day 8Install Proxmox Backup Server; add as storage
  2. Day 9Daily backup job with retention; verify job
  3. Day 10Restore a VM, a single disk, and a single file
  4. Day 11Encrypted backups and key handling
  5. Day 12Sync to a second PBS (remote) over a WAN simulation
  6. Day 13Use our backup planner for a 10 TB estate; compare with your lab numbers
  7. Day 14Review: write the backup policy (RPO/RTO, retention, tests)
Week 3

Advanced

  1. Day 15Ceph on 3 Proxmox VMs (nested) — pools, PGs, a VM on RBD
  2. Day 16Fail an OSD; observe recovery; set recovery throttles
  3. Day 17Multipath iSCSI with two paths; fail one
  4. Day 18Immutable backups: MinIO with object lock as a Veeam/PBS target concept
  5. Day 19Veeam Community Edition: back up a Windows VM app-aware
  6. Day 20Tape concepts and LTO costing exercise
  7. Day 21Review: Ceph vs ZFS decision memo for a 5-node cluster
Week 4

DR & portfolio

  1. Day 22DR drill: restore the whole lab from PBS into a clean cluster; time it
  2. Day 23Capacity plan for 3 years with growth; procurement list
  3. Day 24Monitoring: Zabbix templates for TrueNAS/PBS/Ceph alerts
  4. Day 25Runbook: disk replacement, PBS GC/prune, Ceph health
  5. Day 26Write a ransomware-resilient backup design (3-2-1-1-0)
  6. Day 27Mock interview with our question bank
  7. Day 28Publish diagrams + runbooks; update resume
After day 30

What you will have

  • A portfolio repoDiagrams, configs, scripts and runbooks a hiring manager can read in five minutes.
  • Interview storiesReal faults you fixed — the answers to “tell me about a time…”.
  • A certification targetSee the role path for which exam to book next.
  • A place in our networkFinish the plan, share the repo, and apply — we mentor and place engineers who complete it.

Finished the plan? Show us.

Share your repo and notes; completed plans get a technical conversation with our architects and first paid tasks through the engineer network.

Apply to the networkPractice interview questions