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Backups: Am I doing this right? (lemmy.zip)

submitted 1 year ago by RadDevon@lemmy.zip to c/selfhosted@lemmy.world

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I'm in the process of setting up backups for my home server, and I feel like I'm swimming upstream. It makes me think I'm just taking the wrong approach.

I'm on a shoestring budget at the moment, so I won't really be able to implement a 3-2-1 strategy just yet. I figure the most bang for my buck right now is to set up off-site backups to a cloud provider. I first decided to do a full-system backup in the hopes I could just restore it and immediately be up and running again. I've seen a lot of comments saying this is the wrong approach, although I haven't seen anyone outline exactly why.

I then decided I would instead cherry-pick my backup locations instead. Then I started reading about backing up databases, and it seems you can't just back up the data directory (or file in the case of SQLite) and call it good. You need to dump them first and backup the dumps.

So, now I'm configuring a docker-db-backup container to back each one of them up, finding database containers and SQLite databases and configuring a backup job for each one. Then, I hope to drop all of those dumps into a single location and back that up to the cloud. This means that, if I need to rebuild, I'll have to restore the containers' volumes, restore the backups, bring up new containers, and then restore each container's backup into the new database. It's pretty far from my initial hope of being able to restore all the files and start using the newly restored system.

Am I going down the wrong path here, or is this just the best way to do it?

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[–] MangoPenguin@lemmy.blahaj.zone 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

I first decided to do a full-system backup in the hopes I could just restore it and immediately be up and running again. I’ve seen a lot of comments saying this is the wrong approach, although I haven’t seen anyone outline exactly why.

The main downside is the size of the backup, since you're backing up the entire OS with cache files, log files, other junk, and so on. Otherwise it's fine.

Then I started reading about backing up databases, and it seems you can’t just back up the data directory (or file in the case of SQLite) and call it good. You need to dump them first and backup the dumps.

You can back up the data directory, that works fine for selfhosted stuff generally because we don't have tons of users writing to the database constantly.

If you back up /var/lib/docker/volumes, your docker-compose.yaml files for each service, and any other bind mount directories you use in the compose files, then restoring is as easy as pulling all the data back to the new system and running docker compose up -d on each service.

I highly recommend Backrest which uses Restic for backups, very easy to configure and supports Healthchecks integration for easy notifications if backups fail for some reason.

[–] Shimitar@downonthestreet.eu 3 points 1 year ago

Second rest and backrest!

[–] RadDevon@lemmy.zip 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

If that's the main downside to a full-system backup, I might go ahead and try it. I'll check out Backrest too. Looks great!

[–] MangoPenguin@lemmy.blahaj.zone 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Yeah there are plenty of advantages of a full system backup, like not having to worry that you're backing up all the specific directories needed, and super easy restores since the whole bootable system is saved.

Personally I do both, I have a full system backup to local storage using Proxmox Backup Server, and then to Backblaze B2 using Restic I backup only the really important stuff.