In your opinion what's the best way to do and restore full backups of a Linux server?

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borg

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You Borg the whole disk? Or which paths?

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See excludes here: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Rsync#Full_system_backup

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Nice resource! Thanks

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Also, export your DBs first, and snapshot the export instead of the raw DB files

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Mine is 3-pronged:

  1. btrfs + snapper takes care of most level-1 situations, and I take a snapshot of every /root change, plus one nightly /home snapshot. but it's pretty demanding on disk space, and doesn't handle drive failure; so I also do
  2. restic + USB drive, which I can cram way more snapshots onto, so I keep a couple of weeks of daily snapshots, one monthly snapshot for a year, and one snapshot per year, going back several years. I currently have snapshots from my past 3 computers on one giant drive. However, these drives can also fail, and won't protect me from burglary or house fire, so I also do
  3. restic + BackBlaze. I just take a nightly snapshot for every computer and VM I manage. My monthly B2 bill is around $10. The VMs don't change much, and I only snapshot data and config directories (only stuff I can't spin up fairly quickly in a container, or via a simple install command), so most of the charge comes from a couple of decades of amateur digital photography, and an archive of all our digital music (because I'll be damned if I'm going to spend weeks re-digitizing all those CDs).

The only "restore entire system b/c of screwing up the OS" is #1. I could - and probably should, make a whole disk snapshot to a backup drive via #2, but I'm waiting until bcachefs is more mature, then I'll migrate to that, for the interesting replication options it allows which would make real-time disk replication to slow USB drives practical; I'd only need to snapshot /efi after kernel upgrades, and if I had that set up and a spare NVME on hand, I could probably be back up and running within a half hour.

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I just stop my containers and tar gzip their compose files, their volumes and the /etc folder on the host

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[deleted]

By having it be a container

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OP

Elaborate please.

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The container is reproducible. Container configuration is in version control. That leaves you with the volumes mounted into the container, which you back up like any other disk.

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Dunno why ppl are down voting you, this is 100% the way.

Architecture as code is amazing, being able to completely wipe your server, re-install fresh, and turn it on and it goes right back to how it was is awesome.

GitOps version controlled architecture is easy to maintain, easy to rollback, and easy to modify.

I use k8s for my entire homelab, it has some initial learning curve but once you "get it" and have working configs on github, it becomes so trivial to add more stuff to it, scale it up, etc.

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[deleted]

All of my services run on LXC containers. Some files and configs are backed up to NAS and offsite. The containers are snapshotted in their entirety before I do any work on them. A snapshot takes 5 seconds to make and causes no downtime. If I regret a change or mess it up, I can restore the snapshot in under a minute at the cost of some seconds of downtime.

My only non-container machines are my desktop (doesn't count), my NAS and the Hypervisor. The Hypervisor is very clean and wouldn't be much fuss to reinstall and the NAS is literally just Debian with NFS. All of these have a regular rsync which runs to backup the important files.

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Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I've seen in this thread:

Fewer Letters More Letters
LXC Linux Containers
NAS Network-Attached Storage
NFS Network File System, a Unix-based file-sharing protocol known for performance and efficiency
k8s Kubernetes container management package

4 acronyms in this thread; the most compressed thread commented on today has 16 acronyms.

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I use proxmox and proxmox backup server (in a vm). I reinstall them both, and re-add lxc and vm and their drives from backup. has already worked once.

important files are additionaly synced to laptop and phone using syncthing.

proxmox backups (which are encrypted) are rcloned to backblaze for offsite backup

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Relax and Recover for bare metal backup of the OS critical components and directories, and Deja Dup (or Gnome Backup) for user files

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I found UrBackup to be very easy to use. Very little nitty-gritty setup and configuration required to get started. I have a feeling those with more experience will (rightly) pick apart if I’m missing something egregiously bad about it, but it worked for my small homelab use cases.

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Don't. Backup data, reinstall software.

Answer.

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