Hey there,
I’m in need of a bit of wisdom here:
I recently got myself a shiny new Vserver and have it running exclusively with docker containers that use regular volumes.
Now: how would I back this thing up? I mean, I have read a lot about borg for example, but I’m not sure how to do it the right way:
Do I just copy / to a repo and fiddle the data back in place if stuff goes wrong, or would it be wiser to backup the volumes, do a docker save and export the images to a folder and then send that to the storage box?
Since docker should stop the containers to prevent data inconsistency during a backup: How do I tell Borg to do that? I’ve seen several approaches (Borg Dockerized with some sort of access to docker’s .sock, Borg setup on the host, and some even wilder approaches).
Since Backups aren’t something you can “try again” once you need them, I’d rather have a solution that works.
In all the cases for me is sufficient to backup the folder which host the volume for persistent data of each container. I typically do not care to stop and reload containers but nothing prevents you to do so in the backup script. Indeed if a database is concerned the best way is to create a dump and backup that one file. Considering tools, Borg and restic are both great. I am moving progressively from Borg to restic+rclone to exploit free cloud services.