submitted 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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Hello Self-Hosters,

What is the best practice for backing up data from docker as a self-hoster looking for ease of maintenance and foolproof backups? (pick only one :D )

Assume directories with user data are mapped to a NAS share via NFS and backups are handled separately.

My bigger concern here is how do you handle all the other stuff that is stored locally on the server, like caches, databases, etc. The backup target will eventually be the NAS and then from there it'll be double-backed up to externals.

Is it better to run #cp /var/lib/docker/volumes/* /backupLocation every once in a while, or is it preferable to define mountpoints for everything inside of /home/user/Containers and then use a script to sync it to wherever you keep backups? What pros and cons have you seen or experienced with these approaches?
How do you test your backups? I'm thinking about digging up an old PC to use to test backups. I assume I can just edit the ip addresses in the docker compose, mount my NFS dirs, and failover to see if it runs.
I started documenting my system in my notes and making a checklist for what I need to backup and where it's stored. Currently trying to figure out if I want to move some directories for consistency. Can I just do docker-compose down edit the mountpoints in docker-compose.yml and run docker-compose up to get a working system?

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[-] [email protected] 8 points 17 hours ago

Everyone I know that actually keeps backups has the same kind of story. It's sad that no matter how many other people talk about keeping backups, it always takes a tragic loss like this to get people to buy hardware/subscriptions.

[-] [email protected] 1 points 4 hours ago* (last edited 4 hours ago)

Damn, those stories scare me a lot because I can't afford good enough backups right now, so I rely on mirroring via Syncthing what I can and using an USB for my server (fortunately I don't have a lot of personal things). All the family memories are in multiple locations and devices so I don't have the time (nor storage) to backup those lol

Because of my situation, it takes me some time to save even for second hand things (I just bought a CPU and a new voltage regulator). I'm planning on buying some used HDDs as secondary storage and one as an external. Slowly but surely D:

[-] [email protected] 1 points 3 hours ago

A second device on site is still infinitely more resilient than just letting it rock. Most use cases where a backup would help can be covered by an occasional one way sync or scheduled copy to a USB drive. Offsite is for catastrophes like your home burning down or flooding.

[-] [email protected] 4 points 15 hours ago

I hear you. I worked for an msp where some customers would refuse to invest in backup solutions and we either declined to renew their contract or they suffered an event and we were then setting up backups.

I was in the middle of a migration from OVH to Hetzner. I knew I had good backups at home so the plan was to blow away OVH and restore from backup to Hetzner. This was the mistake.

Mid migration I get an alert from the raid system that a drive has failed and had been marked as offline. I had a spare disk ready, as I planned for this type of event. So I swapped the disk. Mistake number 2.

I pulled the wrong disk. The Adaptec card shit a brick, kicked the whole array out. Couldn't bring it back together. I was too poor to afford recovery. This was my lesson.

Now I only use ZFS or MDRAID, and have multiple copies of data at all times.

this post was submitted on 28 Jun 2025

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