How to Automatically Backup a Linux VPS to a Separate Cloud Storage Service

In that case, it does become as simple as just copying files elsewhere. (For example, using the Restic steps in my post to backup a folder of hourly database dumps, like you mentioned.) Replicating databases (and other methods made specifically for DBs) is certainly a much, much better route for mission-critical and/or enterprise data.

Covering every permutation of different types of data to backup would have made a long post much longer, but I'll add writing a part two to my to-do list covering rudimentary database backups since that has been brought up here a few times.

Thanks for the feedback! :)

For Postgres you can use something like WAL-E to continuously backup to S3 or other cloud storage providers. The underlying mechanism is explained in the Postgres documentation as "Continuous Archiving and Point-in-Time Recovery (PITR)"(https://www.postgresql.org/docs/11/continuous-archiving.html). Using this method you lose a minimal amount of live data when your main server goes down. And if you need to restore, you can also restore at an arbitrary point of time, so e.g. just before you accidentally deleted everything in a table or something like that.

Replica's aren't actually a backup, though it's probably a good idea to have them, and in the case of too much data to reasonably backup, as close as you are going to come.

Also, depending on data structures, for example if your data models fit into something like MongoDB or not, it's easy enough to trigger a dump for each record. I've setup systems where primary records are json+gz files in S3 or Azure blobs. In practice this has been as part of the process that will update ElasticSearch (or Mongo) from an RDBMS authority.

It was pretty easy to do <base>/collection/{ID}.json.gz .. from there, worst case, I'd have to create a re-population script from the hard files, and might lose a little less important data, but would always have a hard recovery path. YMMV of course.

I've got 3 side projects that I've been muddling on getting started and some of the things that have happened to the original author frankly scare me. I'm also working on legal structure (LLCs etc) before any real launch. There are so many edge cases to consider, and sometimes it's hard just getting started and accepting that you will make mistakes along the way.

And do rehearsal as well. Backup may not work.

I'm still convinced that its dedupe is magical. I don't know if there's a backup app that is more frugal with disk space, but Borgbackup has served me well in a non-growing 1.5TB backup area for 3+ years now.

I switched to restic now, which allows to take incremental backups, but can also remove any snapshot to prune the history. Although it does not support compression, due to its deduplication and removing the need to store multiple full backups, the restic repository takes less space now than duplicity before.

In theory, you need to be ready to literally delete every container at any time and pull them from scratch and be 100% fine, since all of your actual data should be stored on the host and mounted as Docker volumes [0]. It's a good Doomsday test if you're looking for one. ;)

[0] https://docs.docker.com/storage/

With kubernetes (and no more specifics than you've mentioned) you should use a Job.

With docker-compose I think I'd be tempted to have a different service that isn't long-running, and a cron job on the host that runs it.

With swarm, unless it supports something like k8s Jobs, (I don't know if it does or not, only used it once briefly and in anger) I'd probably have a 'cronjob' service which was responsible for launching the short-lived services per compose suggestion above.

I know that tarsnap [1] can work with `list`, `write` and `delete` keys.

[1]: http://www.tarsnap.com/man-tarsnap-keymgmt.1.html

Combine that w/ S3 Object Versioning and you’ve got a pretty solid approach.

[1] https://borgbackup.readthedocs.io/en/stable/usage/notes.html...

https://www.rsync.net/products/restic.html

One of the modes of restic is SFTP target and as we run stock, standard OpenSSH, it works perfectly.

EDIT: A sibling comment to yours mentioned 'rclone' and I am happy to informally announce that over the past few months we have rolled out the 'rclone' binary to all of our production fileservers (it requires a server-side binary exe to be in place) and it is being used by rsync.net customers to broker file transfers cloud to cloud to cloud (as rclone is apt to be used for). 'rclone serve' and 'rclone mount' are disallowed for (I think) obvious reasons, but otherwise everything works ...

It depends on what you want to do, but can probably be accomplished in a <= $5 VPS.

The issue is with how network failures (which always eventually happen) interact with the "uninterruptible" Linux process state. Hell breaks loose, and the failure is anything but obvious.

A better way would be to unmount and send the filesystem with 'dd' or something like that, or, to use 'zfs send' but I have a suspicion that neither of those options are available to you ...

I will say that splitting the rsync job (rsnapshot runs rsync underneath) into multiple, smaller jobs, could save you some time if you're running into any resource limits while you walk that big set of inodes... so if you're lucky and you have 4 or 5 or 8 top level dirs that are all roughly the same size, you could do a handful of smaller jobs, one after the other, instead of one huge one ...