I know that for data storage the best bet is a NAS and RAID1 or something in that vein, but what about all the docker containers you are running, carefully configured services on your rpi, installed *arr services on your PC, etc.?
Do you have a simple way to automate backups and re-installs of these as well or are you just resigned to having to eventually reconfigure them all when the SD card fails, your OS needs a reinstall or the disk dies?
There’s lots of very good approaches in the comments.
But I’d like to play the devil’s advocate: how many of you have actually recovered from a disaster that way? Ideally as a test, of course.
A backup system that has never done a restore operations must be assumed to be broken. similar logic should be applied to disaster recovery.
And no: I use Ansible/Docker combined approach that I’m reasonably sure could quite easily recover most stuff, but I’ve not yet fully rebuilt from just that yet.
I have (more than I’d like to admit) recovered entirely from backups.
I run proxmox, everything else in a VM. All VMs get backed up to three different places once a week, backups are tested monthly on a rando proxmox box to make sure they still work. I do like the backup system built into it, serves my needs well.
Proxmox could die and it wouldn’t make much of a difference. I reinstall proxmox, restore the VMs and I’m good to go again.
While rsync is great, I recovered partially from an outtage… Containers with databases need special care: dumping there database…
Lesson learned !
I’m not sure what Ansible does that a simple Docker Compose doesn’t yet but I will look into it more!
My real backup test run will be soon I think - for now I’m moving from windows to docker, but eventually I want to get an older laptop, put linux on it and just move everything to the docker on it instead and pretend it’s a server. The less “critical” stuff I have on my main PC, the less I’m going to cry when I inevitably have to reinstall the OS or replace the drives.
I just use Ansible to prepare the OS, set up a dedicated user, install/setup Rootless Docker and then Sync all the docker compose files from the same repo to the appropriate server and launch/update as necessary. I also use it to centrally administer any cron jobs like for backup.
Basically if I didn’t forget anything (which is always possible) I should be able to pick a brand new RPi with an SSD and replace one of mine with a single command.
It also allows me to keep my entire setup “documented” and configured in a single git repository.
I restored from a backup when I swapped to a bigger SSD. Worked perfectly first try. I use rsnapshot for backups.
I’ve had a complete drive failure twice within the last year (really old hardware) and my ansible + docker + backup made it really easy to recover from. I got new hardware and was back up and running within a few hours.
All of your services setup should be automated (through docker-compose or ansible or whatever) and all your configuration data should be backed up. This should make it easy to migrate services from one machine to another, and also to recover from a disaster.
Pre…pare…? What’s that? Some sorta fruit?
My configuration and deployment is managed entirely via an Ansible playbook repository. In case of absolute disaster, I just have to redeploy the playbook. I do run all my stuff on top of mirrored drives so a single failure isn’t disastrous if I replace the drive quickly enough.
For when that’s not enough, the data itself is backed up hourly (via ZFS snapshots) to a spare pair of drives and nightly to S3 buckets in the cloud (via restic). Everything automated with systemd timers and some scripts. The configuration for these backups is part of the playbooks of course. I test the backups every 6 months by trying to reproduce all the services in a test VM. This has identified issues with my restoration procedure (mostly due to potential UID mismatches).
And yes, I have once been forced to reinstall from scratch and I managed to do that rather quickly through a combination of playbooks and well tested backups.
Dang I really like your idea of testing the backup in a VM… I was worried about how I’d test mine since I only have the one machine, but a VM on my desktop or something should do just fine.
Infrastructure as code/config as code.
The configurations of all the actual machines is managed by Puppet, with all its configs in a git repo. All the actual applications are deployed on top of Kubernetes, with all the configurations managed by helmfile and also tracked in git. I don’t set anything up - I describe how I want things configured, and the tools do the actual work.
There is a “cold start” issue in my scheme - puppet requires a server component that runs on Kubernetes but I can’t deploy onto kubernetes until the host machines have had their puppet manifests applied, but at that point I can just read the code and do enough of the config by hand to bootstrap everything up from scratch if I have to
- Back everything up
rm -rf /. -Now rebuild.
Congratulations, you now know what’s required. :-P
Rebuild to different disks than the ones you backed up though. Don’t restore over your working data.
- Install Debian stable with the ssh server included.
- Keep a list of the packages that were installed after (there aren’t many but still).
- All docker containers have their compose files and persistent user data on a RAID1 array.
- Have a backup running that rsyncs once a day /etc, /home/user and /mnt/array1/docker to another RAID1 to daily/, from daily/ once a week rsync to weekly/, from weekly/ once a monthb timestamped tarball to monthly/. Once a month I also bring out a HDD from the drawer and do a backup of monthly/ with Borg.
For recovery:
- Reinstall Debian + extra packages.
- Restore the docker compose and persistent files.
- Run docker compose on containers.
Note that some data may need additional handling, for example databases should be dumped not rsunced.
Radical suggestion:
- Once a year you buy a hard drive that can handle all of your data.
- rsync everything to it
- unplug it, put it back in cold storage
Once a… year? There’s a lot that can change in a year. Cloud storage can be pretty cheap these days. Backup to something like backblaze, S3 or Glacier nightly instead.
You can save periodically to it like once a month but keep one as a yearly backup.
- Most systems are provisioned in proxmox with terraform.
- Configuration and setup is handled via ansible playbooks after the server is available. 2.a) Do NOT make changes on the server without updating your ansible scripts - except during troubleshooting. 2.b) Once troubleshooting is done delete and re-create the VM from scratch using only scripts to ensure it works.
- VM storage is considered to be ephemeral. All long-term data/config that can’t be re-created with ansible is either stored on an NFS server with a RAID5 dive configuration or backed up to that same file-server using rsnapshot.
- NFS server is backed-up nightly to backblaze using duplicacy.
- Any other non-VM systems like personal laptops and the like are backed up nightly to the file-server using rsnapshot. Those snapshots are then backed up to backblaze using duplicacy.
The most useful philosophy I’ve come across is “make the OS instance disposable.” That means an almost backups-first approach. Everything of importance to me is thoroughly backed up so once main box goes kaput, I just have to pull the most recent copy of the dataset and provision it on a new OS, maybe new hardware if needed. These days, it’s not that difficult. Docker makes scripting backups easy as pie. You write your docker-compose so all config and program state lives in a single directory. Back up the directory, and all you need to get up and running again with your services is access to Docker Hub to fetch the application code.
Some downsides with this approach (Docker’s security model sorta assumes you can secure/segment your home network better than most people are actually able to), but honestly, for throwing up a small local service quickly it’s kind of fantastic. Also, if you decide to move away from Docker the experience will give you insight into what amounts to program state for the applications you use which will make doing the same thing without Docker that much easier.
My server has a raid1 mdadm boot drive. And an 8 dive raid6 with zfs. It’s been running for 14 years now. The only thing that I haven’t replaced over it’s lifetime is the chassis. In fact the proc let out the magic smoke a few weeks ago, after some new parts it’s still going strong.
I used to (over a span of about 4 years now) just rely on a RaidZ2 (ZFS) pool (faulted drive replacements never gave any issues) but I recently did an expansion of the array plus OS reinstall and only now am I starting to incorporate Docker containers into my workflows. The live data is in ~ and nightly rsynced onto the new larger RaidZ2 pool but there is also data on that pool which I’ve thus far never stored anywhere else.
So my answer to the question would be an off-site unraid install which is still in the works. This really will only be that. A catastophe insurance. I probably won’t even rely on parity drives there in order to maximize space since I already have double parity on ZFS.
As far as reinstallation goes, I don’t feel like restoring ~ and running docker compose for all the services again would be too much of a hassle.
By using NixOS and tracking the config files with git
I rsync my root and everything under it to a NAS, will hopefully save my data. I wrote some scripts manually to do that.
I think the next best thing to do is to doco your setup as mich as possible. Either by typed up notes, or ansible/packer/whatever, any documentation is better than nothing if you have to rebuild.
I run history and then clean it up so i have a guide to follow on the next setup. It’s not even so much for drive failure but to move to the newer OS versions when available.
The ‘data’ is backed up by scripts that tar folders up and scp them off to another server.
I run everything on a 2 node proxmox cluster with ZFS mirror volumes and replication of the VMs and CTs between them, run PBS with hourly snapshots, and sync that to multuple USB drives I swap off site.
The docker VM can be ZFS snapshotted before major updates so I can rollback.
You should get another node, otherwise when node1 fails node2 will reboot itself and then do nothing because it has no quorum
pvecm expected 1I know, but every time I had to do that it felt like it’s a jank solution. If you have a raspberry pi or smth like that you can also set it up as a qdevice.
…and if you’re completely fine with how it is you can also just leave it like it is
So I started to write a reply that said basically that I was OK doing that manually, but thought that “hell, I have a PBS box on the network that would do that fine”. So it took about 3 minutes to install the corosync-qdevice packages on all three and enable it. Good to go.
Thanks for the kick in the ass.
So since I now had a “quorate” cluster again, I thought I’d try out HA. I’d always been under the impression that unless you had a shared storage LUN, you couldn’t HA anything. But I thought I’d trigger a replication and then down the 2nd node just as a test. And lo and behold, the first node brought up my OPNsense VM from the replicated image about 2 minutes after the second node lost contact, and internet starts working again.
I’m really excited about having that feature working now. This was a good night, thank you.
If you need another thing to do, you could try to make your opnsense HA and never have your internet stop working while rebooting a node. It’s pretty simple to set up, you might finish it in 1-2 evenings. Happy clustering!
I’ll look into that. I did see the option in opnsense once upon a time but never investigated it.
