SpaceCadet
Honestly I would prefer to be able to buy a separate “Pro” version from the Play Store, without an in-app purchase. There have been issued in the past where in-app purchases didn’t get recognized or when ads suddenly started appearing for people who bought the ad removal option.
As a general rule, you should always keep in mind that you’re not really looking for a backup solution but rather a restore solution. So think about what you would like to be able to restore, and how you would accomplish that.
For my own use for example, I see very little value in backing up docker containers itself. They’re supposed to be ephemeral and easily recreated with build scripts, so I don’t use docker save
or anything, I just make sure that the build code is safely tucked away in a git repository, which itself is backed up of course. In fact I have a weekly job that tears down and rebuilds all my containers, so my build code is tested and my containers are always up-to-date.
The actual data is in the volumes, so it just lives on a filesystem somewhere. I make sure to have a filesystem backup of that. For data that’s in use and which may give inconsistency issues, there are several solutions:
docker stop
your containers, create simple filesystem backup,docker start
your containers.- Do an LVM level snapshot of the filesystem where your volumes live, and back up the snapshot.
- The same but with a btrfs snapshot (I have no experience with this, all my servers just use ext4)
- If it’s something like a database, you can often export with database specific tools that ensure consistency (e.g.
pg_dump
,mongodump
,mysqldump
, … ), and then backup the resulting dump file. - Most virtualization software have functionality that lets you to take snapshots of whole virtual disk images
As for the OS itself, I guess it depends on how much configuration and tweaking you have done to it and how easy it would be to recreate the whole thing. In case of a complete disaster, I intend to just spin up a new VM, reinstall docker, restore my volumes and then build and spin up my containers. Nevertheless, I still do a full filesystem backup of /
and /home
as well. I don’t intend to use this to recover from a complete disaster, but it can be useful to recover specific files from accidental file deletions.
Thanks for summarizing my feelings on systemd in a less inflammatory way than if I had written it myself.
I’ve found that most distributions have implemented it properly and for the most part it works quite well and stays out of my way, it’s only when for some reason you have to dive into the minutiae of a unit file and getting into all the dependencies and stuff that it gets annoying quickly.