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Where to start with backups? (lemmy.world)
submitted 9 months ago by to c/selfhosted@lemmy.world
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hi peeps.

Im early on my selfhosting journey and managed to setup some things as a test in docker. the main service im looking to run is ERPNext. after a while I got it up and running so now I want to back this up including all the customization I did in the app.

where to start with this? any intuitive guide?

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[–] 2 points 9 months ago (3 children)

Modern filesystems like ZFS have snapshots and the ability to incrementally copy those around even over the network. I'd suggest considering using those instead of something that operates on top of the filesystem.

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  • [–] [S] 1 point 9 months ago (2 children)

    Uuh what? Im not sure I follow. this feels more complicated rather that using some sort of service

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  • [–] 1 point 9 months ago

    A snapshot is like copying a the files in the snapshot to another location, while the original files remain as is and can be written to or read from.

    As an example, if you have a folder, let's say /important/secret/stuff, and you want to take a backup of it. You have to make sure that nothing is writing to those files while the backup is running, otherwise the backup risk being corrupted. (This is because if the backup starts to read the file, and halfway through the first part of the file changes, you now have a backuped file that half the old and half the new file).

    With a snapshop, you can "copy" /important/secret/stuff to some other location, run a backup reading from this other location and then remove it. Any changes to the original files will not affect the backup since the backup is reading from the "copied" files (snapshot).

    So what you do is take a snapshot before running the backup, have the backup read from the snapshot and when it is complete, remove the snapshot.

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