fuck yeah monday checkmarks, bitches!
Congrats on becoming one of the 5% of ppl who backup, but actually also test them.
5 %, that many?
There are two kinds of self-hosters: those who backup, and those who will start testing em after their first failed restore.
I tested mine involuntarily. I enabled full disk encryption on my the main drive of my server, ignored all the warnings and then noticed, that the whole drive was formatted.
Luckily, all the important data was in my backups, I lost some compose files and the database of my paperless ngx seems to be broken (although theoretically, I am sure I could recover that data, I just don’t have that time and there is nothing that important on there).
That’s why I have all container configs and stuff like that in a single directory that I can easily back up
Evrtything is in one place so my backups contain everything
Yeah, I now do that aswell.
I learned from my mistakes
Everybody tests their backups. Some people even manage to test their backups before they need them.
How do you check?
rm -rf /(don’t actually do this obv)
Here, you dropped this.
–no-preserve-root
Its OK, root was preserved
Restore a backup and make sure everything is where you left it.
yep! restore a lxc on the backup machine and shut down the main one for a second
Thats good. So many places I see just accept that backup job completed without errors means backups are ok.
You reapply/ reload database and do all the recovery procedure on a clean new installation for everything. Disaster recovery is much a thing together with backup. Depends on your infra how to proceed in concrete steps.
Huge! Feels good, huh?
Question for you, is there an off site backup of your stuff? If there is not an off site back up it aint backed up.
A little while ago there where 3 houses that went up in flames just down the block had the wind been blowing just a little, so many more houses would have gone up but had it blown just a little to the south I am sure my condo complex would have gone up. When the fire fighters told use to get back in to our places but be prepared to move I had all my devices and a few other things ready to go.
I thought how lucky I was to be home and the wind was not blowing, but I realized I needed an off site backup as well.
What are you using to run backups?
proxmox style
apologies if that is not a lot of info!
Proxmox VM snapshots and backups, plus proxsave I assume?
I have a remote backup of my home partition so I don’t loose any documents, videos, etc. How do you test these backups? I can browse them using Pika (GUI for BorgBackup) and I can do an integrity check, is there any more to it? I mean if my drive fails, I just copy those files back into my new drive’s home directory. But I don’t see how a test on that would be beneficial
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I’ve seen in this thread:
Fewer Letters More Letters CGNAT Carrier-Grade NAT Git Popular version control system, primarily for code NAS Network-Attached Storage NAT Network Address Translation VPS Virtual Private Server (opposed to shared hosting)
[Thread #148 for this comm, first seen 27th Oct 2026, 16:10] [FAQ] [Full list] [Contact] [Source code]
nice! for anyone with postgres in the mix, what bit me wasn’t the backup itself but the disk. a table in my side project kept one snapshot per minute and never deleted any, the disk hit 100% and postgres went down with a PANIC for like 40 min. now the nightly pg_dump writes to a .tmp, checks it with gzip -t and only then replaces the old file, and the app warns me if the newest dump is older than 26h or suspiciously small. restoring is just loading it into an empty db and starting the app, boring but it’s the part you actually want to know works
