this post was submitted on 28 Jun 2025
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Docker Backup Stratagy (lemmy.world)
submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by njordomir@lemmy.world to c/selfhosted@lemmy.world
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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.

  1. 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?

  2. 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.

  3. 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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[–] Sinirlan@lemmy.world 10 points 1 year ago (2 children)

I just took line of least effort, all my docker containers are hosted on dedicated VM in proxmox, so I just backup entire VM on weekly basis to my NAS. Already had to restore it once when I was replacing SSD in proxmox host, worked like a charm.

[–] dataprolet@lemmy.dbzer0.com 8 points 1 year ago (3 children)

While that's an easy solution it makes it impossible or rather difficult to restore single containers and/or files.

[–] tofu@lemmy.nocturnal.garden 5 points 1 year ago

It's not that difficult. You can create a second VM from the backup with a few clicks and move the necessary data with scp.

[–] MangoPenguin@lemmy.blahaj.zone 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

It's pretty easy, you can browse files in an LXC backup and restore specific parts. For VMs you can just restore the whole VM and copy out what you need.

[–] njordomir@lemmy.world 2 points 1 year ago

I miss this from cloud hosting. It's helpful to be able to save, clone, or do whatever with the current machine state and easily just flash back to where you were if you mess something up. Might be too much to set up for my current homelab though. My server does have btrfs snapshots of everything directly in grub which has let me roll back a few big screwups here and there.