this post was submitted on 27 Feb 2025
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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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[–] savvywolf@pawb.social 7 points 1 year ago (2 children)

In regards to full system backups, there's no real need to back up the OS itself. Canonical will give you a clean Ubuntu install if you ask then nice enough, after all. Personally, the risk of having to spend an afternoon reconfiguring my system isn't that big a deal compared to the storage and time needed to back up an entire image.

I know systems generate a lot of "cruft" in terms of instslled programs and tweaked configurations over time which can be hard to keep track of and remember. But imo that should be avoided at all costs because it leads to compatibility and security issues.

For backing up databases, there's scripts like automysqlbackup and pg_dump which will export a database to an sql file which can be easily backed up without worrying about copying a broken file.

I actually recently set up borgmatic earlier today and I'd recommend it except for the fact that you seem to be using Docker, and I'm not sure how best to backup containers.

[–] Kng@feddit.rocks 4 points 1 year ago

I usually also backup the etc directory so if I had an issue I would at least have the config files from the old setup. This has already saved me a few times when I have really messed up configuration files.

[–] sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works 1 points 1 year ago

Yeah, I keep everything as simple as possible. Everything is containerized, and all the configs live in one directory and they store their data on my RAID. I don't need to go track down configs across the system, and adding a new service doesn't require any backup config so no risk of forgetting something.

Docker is simple. You map directories in the container to directories on your host, so you put the important data where it'll get backed up and the less important data (e.g. logs) where it won't.