this post was submitted on 18 Nov 2023
99 points (98.1% liked)

Selfhosted

40728 readers
374 users here now

A place to share alternatives to popular online services that can be self-hosted without giving up privacy or locking you into a service you don't control.

Rules:

  1. Be civil: we're here to support and learn from one another. Insults won't be tolerated. Flame wars are frowned upon.

  2. No spam posting.

  3. Posts have to be centered around self-hosting. There are other communities for discussing hardware or home computing. If it's not obvious why your post topic revolves around selfhosting, please include details to make it clear.

  4. Don't duplicate the full text of your blog or github here. Just post the link for folks to click.

  5. Submission headline should match the article title (don’t cherry-pick information from the title to fit your agenda).

  6. No trolling.

Resources:

Any issues on the community? Report it using the report flag.

Questions? DM the mods!

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
 

I know that for data storage the best bet is a NAS and RAID1 or something in that vein, but what about all the docker containers you are running, carefully configured services on your rpi, installed *arr services on your PC, etc.?

Do you have a simple way to automate backups and re-installs of these as well or are you just resigned to having to eventually reconfigure them all when the SD card fails, your OS needs a reinstall or the disk dies?

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 27 points 1 year ago (4 children)

There's lots of very good approaches in the comments.

But I'd like to play the devil's advocate: how many of you have actually recovered from a disaster that way? Ideally as a test, of course.

A backup system that has never done a restore operations must be assumed to be broken. similar logic should be applied to disaster recovery.

And no: I use Ansible/Docker combined approach that I'm reasonably sure could quite easily recover most stuff, but I've not yet fully rebuilt from just that yet.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

I restored from a backup when I swapped to a bigger SSD. Worked perfectly first try. I use rsnapshot for backups.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

I have (more than I’d like to admit) recovered entirely from backups.

I run proxmox, everything else in a VM. All VMs get backed up to three different places once a week, backups are tested monthly on a rando proxmox box to make sure they still work. I do like the backup system built into it, serves my needs well.

Proxmox could die and it wouldn’t make much of a difference. I reinstall proxmox, restore the VMs and I’m good to go again.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I'm not sure what Ansible does that a simple Docker Compose doesn't yet but I will look into it more!

My real backup test run will be soon I think - for now I'm moving from windows to docker, but eventually I want to get an older laptop, put linux on it and just move everything to the docker on it instead and pretend it's a server. The less "critical" stuff I have on my main PC, the less I'm going to cry when I inevitably have to reinstall the OS or replace the drives.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

I just use Ansible to prepare the OS, set up a dedicated user, install/setup Rootless Docker and then Sync all the docker compose files from the same repo to the appropriate server and launch/update as necessary. I also use it to centrally administer any cron jobs like for backup.

Basically if I didn't forget anything (which is always possible) I should be able to pick a brand new RPi with an SSD and replace one of mine with a single command.

It also allows me to keep my entire setup "documented" and configured in a single git repository.

[–] deepdive 2 points 1 year ago

While rsync is great, I recovered partially from an outtage... Containers with databases need special care: dumping there database...

Lesson learned !