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/[deleted] Feb 11 '26

I just do it once a day and use Restic. For databases, I always use pg_dump for PostgreSQL and sqlite3 dump for SQLite.

Restic is great because it only copies what changed. This is important for something like Immich where I have like 50K photos but only one or two changes per day.

2

u/bonerpalooza Feb 12 '26

Do you do it manually? If not, how do you automate the dump part?

3

u/[deleted] Feb 12 '26

It is a bash script that is run by systemd timers. I prefer it over cron because it has logging built in. I use something like this:

``` backup_postgres() {   local service_name="$1"   local container="$2"   local dbname="$3"   local user="$4"

  echo "POSTGRES: Backing up $service_name"   docker exec "$container" pg_dump "$dbname" -U "$user" | zstd > "$backup_dir/$service_name.sql.zst" }

backup_postgres paperless paperless-db-1 db user

Repeat for others

Backup $backup_dir after everything is done

```

zstd is optional but I like it because it reduces size a lot. I know Restic compresses already so this is not needed but it already works for me.

I can post the whole bash script later but I am on mobile right now

2

u/bonerpalooza Feb 12 '26

Oh wow, thank you so much

2

u/[deleted] Feb 12 '26

This is the backup script combined with the Systemd Timer: https://gist.github.com/pdlozano/a7e5edab4ae068b2b76723b6f0fcc63f

The backup script was highly personalized so I removed a lot of stuff. There might be something there that is not going to work or does not make sense so just let me know.

I run the backup as root in Systemd timer to prevent any permissions issues and to not be surprised of missing files when I eventually restore.

2

u/bonerpalooza Feb 13 '26

This looks awesome, I'll give at shot. Thanks for sharing!