Comment by ornornor | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ornornor | Hacker News Reader

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How do you do backups?

I’ve had a homelab for a decade and I could never figure backups out properly.

I use proxmox with containers, VMs when I have no choice, and a portainer machine that runs docker containers when I have no choice.

I use ansible so in each playbook I have a task to backup periodically to rsync.net

But that requires a lot of work because it must be setup for each service, doesn’t work with the docker machine because docker is weird to me and I can’t use ansible to setup stuff within th container, and proxmox’s backup are too big for my rsync account. Besides I only need the actual data in the backup, not the whole OS.

Any insights?

As my sibling says, zfs send and receive is excellent. If your datasets are encrypted they remain encrypted at the other end, without any requirement to unlock them on your backup server (should you only partially trust it, for example.) It works for incrementals but you have to manually specify the delta point for each send — it’s not like rsync where it figures out the differences automatically.

I use zfs send/recv to update a pile of USB drives each time I do a physical offsite backup. I also use it to gather data from other hosts onto my main data computer.

Once everything is there I then archive each snapshot of each filesystem as a new borg archive. This is efficient — borg only backs up changes — but it requires a rescan of all the data. This happens at ~50MB/s on my opteron with 4TB WD Red HDDs.

Check out Proxmox Backup Server - you can install it on top of PVE. My home server backs up locally to it's own PBS datastores, which then get synced over to a $6 dedicated server running PBS in Europe.

Use ZFS snapshots and send & receive. It so good and easy! I backup everything with it, VM's, containers, databases, files.

Where do you backup to?

To my parents, who lives 30 minutes from me. Alternatives would be some other family member or friend you trust.

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