Comment on Docker Backup Stratagy
lazynooblet@lazysoci.al 15 hours ago
I’m lucky enough to run a business that needs a datacenter presence. So most my home-lab (including Lemmy) is actually hosted on a Dell PowerEdge R740xd in the DC. I can then use the small rack I have at home as off-site backups and some local services.
I treat the entirety of /var/lib/docker as expendable. When creating containers, I make sure any persistent data is mounted from a directory made just to host the persistent data. It means docker compose down --rmi all --volumes isn’t destructive.
When a container needs a database, I make sure to add an extra read-only user. And all databases have their container and persistent volume directory named so scripts can identify them.
The backup strategy is then to backup all non-database persistent directories and dump all SQL databases, including permissions and user accounts. This gets run 4 times a day and the backup target is an NFS share elsewhere.
This is on top of daily backuppc backups of critical folders, automated Proxmox snapshots for docker hosts every 20 minutes, daily VM backups via Proxmox Backup Server and replication to another PBS at home.
I also try and use S3 where possible (seafile and lemmy are the 2 main uses) which is hosted in a container on a Synology RS2423RP+. Synology HyperBackup then performs a backup overnight to the Synology RS822+ I have at home.
Years ago I fucked up, didn’t have backups, and lost all the photos of my sons early years. Backups are super important.
hazl@lemmy.blahaj.zone 13 hours ago
That’s a heart breaking way to learn your lesson about backups. It must have taken a long time to accept.
pory@lemmy.world 11 hours ago
Everyone I know that actually keeps backups has the same kind of story. It’s sad that no matter how many other people talk about keeping backups, it always takes a tragic loss like this to get people to buy hardware/subscriptions.
lazynooblet@lazysoci.al 9 hours ago
I hear you. I worked for an msp where some customers would refuse to invest in backup solutions and we either declined to renew their contract or they suffered an event and we were then setting up backups.
I was in the middle of a migration from OVH to Hetzner. I knew I had good backups at home so the plan was to blow away OVH and restore from backup to Hetzner. This was the mistake.
Mid migration I get an alert from the raid system that a drive has failed and had been marked as offline. I had a spare disk ready, as I planned for this type of event. So I swapped the disk. Mistake number 2.
I pulled the wrong disk. The Adaptec card shit a brick, kicked the whole array out. Couldn’t bring it back together. I was too poor to afford recovery. This was my lesson.
Now I only use ZFS or MDRAID, and have multiple copies of data at all times.