1w ago

Backups: Am I doing this right?

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?

30 comments

You are looking for a disaster recovery plan. I believe you are going down the right path, but it’s something that will take time.
I backup important files to my local NAS or directly store them on the local NAS.
This NAS then backs up to an off site cloud backup provider BackBlaze B2 storage.
Finally, I have a virtual machine that has all the same directories mounted and backs up to a different cloud provider.
It’s not quite 3-2-1… but it works.
I only backup important files. I do not do full system backups for my windows clients. I do technically backup full Linux vms from within Proxmox to my NAS…but that’s because I’m lazy and didn’t write a backup script to back up specific files and such. The idea of being able to pull a full system image quickly from a cloud provider will bite you in the ass.
In theory, when backing up containers, you want to backup the configurations, data, and the databases… but you shouldn’t worry about backing up the container image. That can usually be pulled when necessary. I don’t store any of my docker container data in volumes… I use the folder mapping from host to directory in docker container… so I can just backup directories on the host instead of trying to figure out the best way to backup a randomly named docker volume. This way I know what I’m backing up for sure.
Any questions, just ask!