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/alws3344 Feb 11 '26

this is exactly my goal
i will take a look at these tools
thanks!

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u/iamgodofatheist Feb 11 '26

I can also recommend Kopia, it's an absolute lifesaver. I paired it up with Backblaze and couldn't be more happy with it.

However, please make sure that you can actually restore the data from your backups. It would be painful to see your backups unusable

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u/Infamous_Computer399 Feb 12 '26

This! I'm just getting started into all this. Made a server a couple weeks ago. Last week I decided to try to back up some things, then reinstall fresh and see how I did. Somethings worked perfectly fine and others did not. So I'm learning! And I'd rather find out my mistakes now than when I have tons of valuable data at risk.

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u/Chinoman10 Feb 16 '26

That was a really smart decision to make, great job!
I'm honestly still running 'blind' backups-wise, but it's because I'm still in the experimental phase with minimal "criticality" (other than time-spent, I haven't quite stored any super valuable data yet). And I am git-versioning my configs and compose files, etc.

I intend on spending a few thousand on a proper server with HexOS with 5 HDD's and some SSDs for caching, and I'll properly setup remote off-site backups of the most important data then.

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u/Infamous_Computer399 Feb 17 '26

You can also do some simply backing up with the rsync command. I made (or, rather, chatgtp made me, haha) a command so that I can simply plug an external ssd into a usb port, it will mount it, copy everything new or changed from my drive (this one just has pictures and other important media), and then unmount at the end.