Got it running, now how do I back it up?

Comments

• SpaceCadet@sopuli.xyz ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  As a general rule, you should always keep in mind that you’re not really looking for a backup solution but rather a restore solution. So think about what you would like to be able to restore, and how you would accomplish that.

  For my own use for example, I see very little value in backing up docker containers itself. They’re supposed to be ephemeral and easily recreated with build scripts, so I don’t use docker save or anything, I just make sure that the build code is safely tucked away in a git repository, which itself is backed up of course. In fact I have a weekly job that tears down and rebuilds all my containers, so my build code is tested and my containers are always up-to-date.

  The actual data is in the volumes, so it just lives on a filesystem somewhere. I make sure to have a filesystem backup of that. For data that’s in use and which may give inconsistency issues, there are several solutions:

  • docker stop your containers, create simple filesystem backup, docker start your containers.
  • Do an LVM level snapshot of the filesystem where your volumes live, and back up the snapshot.
  • The same but with a btrfs snapshot (I have no experience with this, all my servers just use ext4)
  • If it’s something like a database, you can often export with database specific tools that ensure consistency (e.g. pg_dump, mongodump, mysqldump, … ), and then backup the resulting dump file.
  • Most virtualization software have functionality that lets you to take snapshots of whole virtual disk images

  As for the OS itself, I guess it depends on how much configuration and tweaking you have done to it and how easy it would be to recreate the whole thing. In case of a complete disaster, I intend to just spin up a new VM, reinstall docker, restore my volumes and then build and spin up my containers. Nevertheless, I still do a full filesystem backup of / and /home as well. I don’t intend to use this to recover from a complete disaster, but it can be useful to recover specific files from accidental file deletions.

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  • fraydabson@sopuli.xyz ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    This one offers the most info on understanding backups!!

    For my own use I am a fan of rsync. Sync my files to a backup hard drive and off site location. Just backup the compose files and directories.

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• Dave@lemmy.nz ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  For my personal stuff, I usedocker compose to create bind mounts for all volumes. These are all within a docker-compose directory. Then I use a cron job to shut down the containers, then zip up the docker-compose directories and start the containers again.

  The way to make sure your backups are working is to regularly restore from them (generally into a VM for me).

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  • whynotzoidberg@lemmy.world ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    The way to make sure your backups are working is to regularly restore from them

    Just here to echo this. Hope is not a plan.

    Taking a backup is a warm fuzzy. Restoring is a nail biter.

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    • dandroid@dandroid.app ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      I wanted to migrate to a bigger SSD. I did it by backing up my old one with rsnapshot then restoring onto a fresh Linux install on the new SSD. I had to update /etc/fstab to mount my new SSD instead of my old one, and that was it! Easy peasy. Now I have backups and restores tested, too. And then I just set up a cron job to keep backing everything up nightly.

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• Decronym@lemmy.decronym.xyz ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I’ve seen in this thread:

  Fewer Letters	More Letters
  Git	Popular version control system, primarily for code
  HTTP	Hypertext Transfer Protocol, the Web
  SSD	Solid State Drive mass storage
  nginx	Popular HTTP server

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  [Thread #16 for this sub, first seen 10th Aug 2023, 14:25] [FAQ] [Full list] [Contact] [Source code]

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• butter@midwest.social ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  Back up the stuff you wouldn’t want to have to do again. I back up my music thrice, and don’t back up my movies or TV unless it’s particularly rare or hard to find. I back up my nginx configs, and my apps folders, with all the docker configs and app files, manually. Every couple of weeks, since having a slightly out of date version isn’t that bad.

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• EncryptKeeper@lemmy.world ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  I’ve been using Kopia which runs in a docker container and backs up my data to B2. It does daily, weekly, monthly, and yearly copies. You can browse your backups on a file level inside the UI and redownload just what you want or do a full restore. It’s all encrypted in B2 as well. I’ve had to use it to download backups of corrupted SQLite files and I haven’t had a single issue with it yet.

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• isaachernandez@lemmy.world ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  I don’t know a lot about vserver or borg, but where do your volumes live? On the same machine? Different hard drive?

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• aesir@lemmy.world ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  In all the cases for me is sufficient to backup the folder which host the volume for persistent data of each container. I typically do not care to stop and reload containers but nothing prevents you to do so in the backup script. Indeed if a database is concerned the best way is to create a dump and backup that one file. Considering tools, Borg and restic are both great. I am moving progressively from Borg to restic+rclone to exploit free cloud services.

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