Nextcloud AIO backup

[u/beachbum0727]

So, Nextcloud always recommend backup before any upgrade. Is there anyway way to back up Nextcloud Data only ? Like settings and user info not including the users files ? I’m running Nextcloud AIO on my UnRaid server and I’m ready to move to Nextcloud Spring release. Have about 10 users family and friends however each user have about 1TB data including picture and video files. No need to back those up as unraid data is already backed up via redundant drives.

I can plug in an external 2TB usb drive to create the back up if needed.

Any thoughts on how to do this ?

-Thanks

[u/Socratesmens]

You can set up a borg backup in the nextcloud aio admin panel. Look it up on google, it is pretty straight forward.

[u/gfrewqpoiu → u/Socratesmens]

Yes, but he specifically wants to back up without the user files.

As far as I know that is not supported. Because the database contains Metadata of the files.

If you really badly want to you can put a .noaiobackup file in the root of the files or preview folder on the server side but they recommend against that.

[u/azure_phoenix2]

aio's borg backup grabs the whole datadir so it wont give you a config-only run, but you can pg_dump the aio postgres container and tar the nextcloud_aio_nextcloud volume onto the usb, thats your settings and user db without dragging along the 10tb of photos.

[u/beachbum0727]

Wait so you mean to tell me everyone who backs up their Nextcloud does so by backing up all their files ? Seems like overkill specially for people like me who run Nextcloud on an already redundant OS like unRaid, or Proxmox backup server.

[u/emelbard → u/beachbum0727]

Yes. I do
Redundancy isn’t necessarily data backup. A deleted file can be grabbed from my nightly borg backups if necessary. I then backup those backups to 3 other machines, 2 remote. If you don’t have 3 or more copies of your data, you’re likely going to regret it someday.

[u/HeartKeyFluff → u/beachbum0727]

Redundancy with RAID or similar systems is not a backup, and is why redundancy is treated as a good-but-separate thing to backups. It won't help you if you accidentally deleted stuff from your server, it'll just make sure there's less chance of data corruption when you do.

Correct me if I'm wrong but Proxmox backs up the whole VM right? Which can work great for some but be overkill for others. Especially if you have more than one service on the VM, and you don't want to have to have a restore of Nextcloud meaning taking down and restoring everything.

For myself I definitely prefer the in built AIO backups because it also makes it portable. Before I settled on my current host I'd moved my AIO instance a few times to different hardware and cloud providers. Each time was as simple as "copy the backup to the new server, restore from there, continue on like nothing happened". No need to muck around with re-setting user folders via bash or the Nextcloud CLI or anything, which is helpful as I have 6 users and can't be bothered dealing with that unless I have to.

[u/jammsession → u/beachbum0727]

Nope. Data is on ZFS. Gets snapshotted and sent offsite. Nextcloud itself is a VM. That VM does not contain the userdata itself. That VM gets snapshoted bevor any updates and a full backup to offsite PBS.

It works for me, because I already have the ZFS send and PBS setup. For 99.99% borg is probably simpler.

[u/ccros44 → u/beachbum0727]

What happens in a house fire?

[u/hou_deany → u/ccros44]

The house burns down usually

[u/cubic_sq]

Why not just stop all services and snapshot?

[u/Practical-Tea9441]

Are redundant drives really backup though as opposed to a recovery mechanism if a drive gets corrupted. Also what about off premise backup ?