Hi all
I’m running several docker containers with local persistent volumes that I would like to backup. I haven’t found an easy method to do so.
What do you use / recommend to do that? AFAIK you can’t just rsync the volume directory while the container is running.
Use bind mounts instead of docker volumes. Then you just have normal directories to back up, the same as you would anything else.
This is your answer. It also has the benefit of allowing you to have a nice folder structure for your Docker setup, where you have a folder for each service holding the corresponding compose yaml and data folder(s)
Rsync works fine for most data. (I use borgbackup) For any database data, create a dump using pg_dump or mysqldump or whatever. Then backup the dump and all other volumes but exclude the db volume.
In general there is no problem in rsync’ing the volume directory. But that depends on the application, which is running in the container. I. e. you should not copy the files of a running database. It may corrupt the data while it’s being written.
