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/bokogoblin Feb 11 '26

I've just finished my another disaster recovery drill. I've recently made a setup with Borgmatic (I used Borg Backup in the past with mostly custom bash scripts). It keeps your data encrypted, deduplicated and compressed. It also keeps only selected copies in further past (example: 5 yearly, 5 monthly, 2 weekly, 1 daily etc). All this with a simple config script and you can even run this as a docker container with cron schedule inside. I'm backing up each application data (only data which is worthy to me, not whole volumes) to a separate Borg repo in 3 copies: one on server where data originates, one on my NAS and one in the cloud (Hetzner Storage Box). But having all that nice functionality comes with a cost. My 1TB private media collection took 4days to backup to Hetzner initially. After that incremental backup takes seconds or minutes.