I bought a second hand NUC to have a little more horsepower to run various services. I have it connected to my NAS, but almost all of the docker volumes reside on the SSD in the NUC.
It would be nice to be able to backup those volumes to my NAS in case the NUC fails. I have Debian 12 running on it.
What are my options ? Should I just backup my docker volumes or does it make more sense to backup the entire NUC ? (I’m less tech savvy then I might appear. Please be generous with your explanation, I still have a lot to learn)
Wow people are recommending a lot of things I don’t do and now I’m worried I’m doing something wrong.
I just have a folder on my Ubuntu boot drive called Docker with all of the persistent data from my containers. And I just tell Duplicati to backup that folder to BackBlaze. I don’t stop the containers to do that. Am I doing something wrong?
IMHO not really.
There is the slight chance that DBs get inconsistent with backing up hot DB files, but in a homelab with minimal load this is usually not an issue. Same for NFS.
Just make sure you have older backups, too. Just in case the last backup was not good.
Some people would say that you’re doing something wrong by using Duplicati, because they’ve had problems restoring data and it’s very slow, so if you’ve never had to restore data before you should test that to check that it works, and maybe switch to something else like Borg to be safe.
Also, backing up the folder without stopping the containers first might result in any backed up databases being corrupt, so if you’re running anything that uses databases, you should stop those containers before backing up the folder.
How would you automate the stopping of the containers?
I’m not sure, but I think you’d just need to create a script which stops them, runs the backup, and then restarts them.