Tailscale for off-site backups

[jadudm]

I just thought I'd mention a fun use of Tailscale, which I'm unreasonably pleased with, even though it was minimal effort to do.

To start, I have Cloudron backing up to a local SSD. It's an old 2.5" that has enough space for the host backups (which are... rsync format, I think).

This weekend, I took a an old, small machine (a NUC I accumulated from years ago), installed Ubuntu 22.04 on it, plugged in an old 1TB USB HDD, and took it to an undisclosed remote location. (Read: a family member's house.) I set up my fstab to mount the USB drive by ID, so it should always come up on boot. (I also remembered to set the machine's bios so it would come on after power failures.)

I then installed Tailscale on both my Cloudron host and this aging NUC. Finally, I set up my crontab on the Cloudron host to run rclone every now and then. It clones my backup (from the SSD) to the remote, undisclosed location over the Tailscale network.

This saved me a ton of time in terms of setting up a hole in the remote router (for a secure SSH connection), as well as worrying about whether or not I have secured SSH adequately. Granted, I'm trusting Tailscale to do the right thing here, but I figure it has a better chance of being secure than me quickly hacking things together.

Although it isn't a full "Cloudron using Tailscale" story, it is nice that the default Tailscale configuration is to leave all your public networks alone. As a result, the Cloudron host can be set up to replicate backups elsewhere very quickly and easily.

[doodlemania2]

@jadudm Great usecase - just make sure to practice the recovery process! I've had tailscale on my CR boxes for years for various purposes and never had a single issue - it's solid!

[necrevistonnezr]

@jadudm For remote backups, also look at restic - deduplication, compression, versioning, and E2E encryption built-in.

[jadudm]

@necrevistonnezr I think I was six of one / half-dozen of another on rclone and restic, but I'll definitely give a look. I'm discovering my solution... suffers from bandwidth issues. As in, I got a call asking why streaming wasn't working... I have a suspicion it was because I had saturated the link at the other end running a backup.

@doodlemania2 ... yes. Testing backups is a must-do. I think I'm going to set up a VM with Cloudron on it so I can 1) snapshot and 2) test restores. Unless there's a "better way" to test my backups that you (or anyone else in the community) knows of?

[doodlemania2]

that's how i roll it