Recent Backup Experience and some thoughts
-
Hello everyone! Just yesterday I realized that a VPS on which I've installed CapRover and then Minio is only running Ubuntu 18.04. I thought about doing one of those in-place OS upgrades but decided against it due to potential complications which in turn would complicate my backups of my Cloudron (this has been my main backup destination).
Fortunately I realized I have a spare 2TB Servarica VPS with 2GB RAM on which I have installed a second Cloudron, mostly to try Nextcloud. So, I quickly installed Minio as the second free app, set it up, and voilà, it was ready to be the interim backup destination for my main Cloudron.
I scheduled the Cloudron-wide backup to start at midnight, and it did. I could see the backups growing in the assigned bucket (I use the rsync option). I turned on all my apps, including the data-heavy ones, as I wanted a full backup.
All this to share that my Cloudron with 53 apps, including such heavy hitters as ArchiveBox,
Docker, Jellyfin, Kavita, Paperless, Sync, Peertube (all with LOTS of data) took 9 hours and 12 minutes to backup, and the size was 197GB. The destination Cloudron was running on a VPS with 2GB ram and 2GB swap.I share this to help newcomers anticipate storage needs. In fact, some recent posts where users disks filled up are actually good news. They have just learned, and will now never forget, about the importance of backups...external backups at that. The easy-to-manage-backup days of static sites and more or less static WP sites are over. Federated apps, chat and communication apps, media apps, ALL need lots of storage. This is not a weakness of Cloudron. This is the reality of self-hosting a modern web environment.
And I love it!
(So now I need to reinstall a newer Ubuntu on the VPS (Kimsufi KS-01) which had the CapRover+Minio... and I'm thinking I might just skip CapRover and install a THIRD Cloudron. I'm getting ready for that multi-server Cloudron that ppl have been asking for!!)
A life lived in fear is a life half-lived
-
Sure @timconsidine I'm planning on keeping the Kimsufi server as my main backup, but I need to reinstall the OS totally, thus losing everything. So, on the off-chance that something happens to my Cloudron during these few days while I get this done, I've used the Servarica server (which already had my 2nd Cloudron install) as my interim backup, using the Cloudron Minio app. But, I'm trying to keep the Servarica server strictly for media (thus the Nextcloud install), and as we all know, Cloudron backups, especially things like Mastodon, add up quickly, so this is a one-and-done backup to that Minio. I'll keep it for a week or so until there is a safe amount of backup on the reinstalled Kimsufi server.
In the next day or two I'll reinstall to Ubuntu 22 on my current main backup, install Cloudron (since I'm not using the current CapRover for anything other than its Minio), then Minio, and resume using it as my main backup destination.
