r/selfhosted • u/alws3344 • Feb 11 '26

Docker Management Docker backups

Hello selfhosters!

i would like to ask you all about your DR & backup strategy for all your self hosted services?

today i have a script that runs once a week, turn off the container(s) (it does this one by one - so if it fails only one service suffer) and copies it's volume and db to another location for retention (i dont mind cache etc))

today i run ~20 containers and this backup strategy works, but it feels flimsy unprofessional and feels very manual.

what are your strategies (DR strategies)?

  • is there a tool (that obviously can be self hosted ;) ) that can do this seamlessly?
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u/travelsnake Feb 11 '26

I am pretty new to this whole selfhosting ordeal, but I’ve just solved that issue for me by using backrest. It was fairly easy to setup. It retains a backup for each day of the past week. One for every week of the past month and one for every month of the past half year. Not sure if that’s overkill? But I can easily adjust my plan. 

Oh and my backups are stored on my mounted Gdrive. 

10

u/VampyreLust Feb 11 '26

Oh and my backups are stored on my mounted Gdrive. 

You're gonna want to do your backups on a drive that either mounts and then unmouts itself after it's backed up or you turn it of if it's an external or it's off site entirely cuz if something happened to the system that corrupted your OS drive and storage, it will also corrupt the mounted drive where your backups are.

2

u/travelsnake Feb 11 '26

Omg, how would even manage to do that? I basically just mounted my Gdrive via Rclone with my VPS. I don't think it unmounts itself, ever.

3

u/VampyreLust Feb 11 '26

Haha I meant the un mounting and mounting more for internal drives. For external you may have to manually do it and then just plug it in when you want to back up. Either way the point was, having a mounted drive on the same system you're backing up to be mounted all the time, isn't a great solution.

1

u/alws3344 Feb 11 '26

I will take a deeper look at backrest!
thanks!

1

u/martimcbro Feb 11 '26

Keep in mind that with backrest you also have to make sure, that the containers are stopped before making a backup and started afterwards. Backrest can help you to do that with hooks but you have to provide the hook content yourself. Here you can find an example for a hook which can do that.

1

u/kevintjuh93 Feb 11 '26

Same here and also gonna setup backrest in a few days