Hello everyone!

I have a small OrangePi running some small services on it (some with Docker and some without Docker).

And I’d love to know how do you backup your single-board computers.

Do you just rsync the system to a storage server ? Do you plug in a USB drive and rsync on it ? Do you save only the important data or the whole system ?

For now my SBC is not backed-up and I’d like to get a good backup solution up and running quickly! (I don’t trust SD cards to last long…)

I have access to USB drives and disks and also another big server with 20TB of storage which I can make the backup to if needed!

Thanks for your help !

  • Darkassassin07English
    2·
    10 months ago

    I wrote a bash script a while back that uses sshfs to mount an ssh server to the filesystem, then uses dd to write /dev/mmcblk0 to it as hostname-date.img and finally unmount the ssh server. Cron job runs that daily.

    I run that on each of my rpis. (just one rn, but theres been as many as 4 going).

    Any time I have an issue, be that my fault or not, I can just pull the sd card and write the last .img to it directly.

    There’s some extra stuff in there too: it checks for the dependancy sshfs and installs it if missing (for deploying to a new system without reconfiguring), cleans up backups older than x days, logging, and the ability to write the log file as a test instead of the whole filesystem.

    • jkrtn@lemmy.mlEnglish
      1·
      10 months ago

      Sorry, but do you have a setup where you don’t need to worry about the atomicity of that operation? It sounds simple and effective, so I’d like to do it, but I’m concerned I may get something halfway through a write.

      I suppose the odds are you’d have at worst a bad log file whereas config files and binaries are used read-only the majority of the time.

      • Darkassassin07English
        2·
        10 months ago

        I’ve run it on every pi I’ve used for several years now, though they are typically pretty quiet systems. Usually something like pihole or a reverse proxy. Not much writing going on. I’ve restored about a dozen of those images and never had an issue.

        I also tend to keep 3-6 backups at a time. If the most recent is messed up for some reason, there’s others to try. (though I’ve never actually had to try more than one)