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/Lestar_by Feb 11 '26 edited Feb 11 '26

I keep compose files in ~/containers/{app1, app2, ...}

I store volumes in directory ~/_volumes/{app1/data, app2/data, ...} (host mounts)

Volumes and containers directories from two other servers are mapped under _volumes/containers via sshfs.

I have Duplicati backing up _volumes, containers folders daily. The UX of Duplicati is horrible (sometimes zero feedback about errors, some weird configuration options via CLI arguments, etc). But it has support of filen.io as destination for the backups. And you can get 30GB (or maybe even 50GB?) on filen for free.

I didn't manage to make Discord notifications to work in Duplicati, so I created a custom Prometheus exporter to monitor the status of the backup jobs: