Hey all, i would like to get some feedback on my backup strategy.
I have a debian webserver with a ZFS pool running nextcloud aio, immich and jellyfin. Thinking about adding other services as well but nextcloud and immich are the most important ones. The docker volumes of these services point of course to the zfs pool. My backup strategy would now be to use the internal backup solutions for nextcloud and immich to backup their databases, then stop the docker containers and do a borg backup of the zfs pool. The backups would be stored an extern hard drive (I want to expand on this but for now this is all I can afford). is this a viable approach or do i miss something? Could there be problems in case of a backup with the databases etc? The docker compose files are also stored on another machines together with my server documentation.
If you are storing everything on the ZFS filesystem, taking a snapshot in ZFS will include all that data. So if you keep hourly snapshots for the past 24 hours, and daily snapshots for the past week, and then monthly for 3 months for example, you can often dip into those to do recovery when the issue is “oops I deleted something I didn’t want to” rather than going to your huge backup and restoring the entire system
Yes, but zfs snapshots are not an off-site backup which is more what i am looking for. Besides this, zfs snapshots are of course something i want to implement
If you use zfs for docker, dbs and vms you don’t have to shut down anything. Just snapshot and send/recv to sync snapshots to another ZFS drive.
You can even mount and copy the latest snapshot to the cloud with rsync/rclone; probably also borg/restic/kopia. Each applications state will be internally consistent if the snapshot is performed for all data at the same time. If you’re paranoid you can stop everything for a few mins to perform the snapshot, but it’s not really necessary.