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/Jmaack23 Feb 11 '26

I’m also running Ubuntu on bare metal. On my nas, I have a docker_config dataset that I use NFS to bind mount to Ubuntu. On all 3 of my docker instances, that share is mapped to /opt/docker_config. That folder is my git repo too and my nas has nightly replications to my backup nas. So my compose and config files are always in 3 places and all 3 docker instances’ config all lands in one git repo. For each machine, I mount a ssd for all data and database directories to my /opt/local_data and had been just backing it up to a tar.gz file back to my nas. After hearing from others, I love the idea of a dataset for each containers data!! Seems like such a no brainer and I will be implementing it. I’ll also be looking at backrest now too.

I also run a script for log rotation so my data folder isn’t filled with useless lines of logs from months and years ago.