Backup Improvements: Restic Backend

[imc67]

@girish after 4 months I'm still curious for the results of the "backups rewrite" as our daily backup now takes >5 hours

[girish]

@imc67 the rewrite hasn't happened I think this will only happen over xmas and new year vacation when support is low.

[imc67]

Any update on the backup methodology? I read a lot of issues in the forum about crashing backups due to several reasons. Maybe this can help?

[girish]

@imc67 we have not started working on a restic backend, if that's what you are asking.

I think most of the issues are just because of using a large variety of s3 providers. There's way too many of them. Made worse by people choosing the cheapest/low end providers who don't provide any support either. That and SSHFS/CIFS flakiness. I doubt moving to restic solves any of this because they are not related to backup code itself but infrastructure related. Just my thoughts though.

Now instead of dealing with our backup issues, we would be dealing with issue of another backend like say 1, 2 and 3 - these are just restic issues of last week. It would be worse because we have not much idea on how to deal with restic bugs.

[robi]

@girish It could also be the opposite experience, since restic would be handling all the issues, meaning less work for you with custom one-off fixes as they crop up.

[imc67]

FWIW I have a RaspberryPi for 3 years with a Restic daily backup to a Cloudron Minio S3 and 2 weeks ago I needed a restore for the first time. It took me the most time to rediscover how I configured it 3 years ago and how to restore but it worked flawless! I know it’s just n=1 but it’s worth to have a look at it.

[girish]

@robi yes definitely.

I do know that people want urgent fixes when backups and restores are not working, I just don't know how we can take up this responsibility. If my production site is down and it doesn't restore, what now? This will cost us real money because people will ask for a refund.

[fbartels]

@girish I think something that could be interesting, is the ability to use the cloudron filesystem dump and then have a "hook" that could post process the data. Possibly with capturing whatever that hook produces in a cloudron notification (to be natively informed if the post processing fails).

I have set up a few cloudrons in the last week with a combination of local disk rsync in cloudron (with local retention and hardlinks) and then using autorestic and Cron to push the cloudron backup via sftp to a hetzner storageboxes (optionally as a subuser). Have even performed a restore test, for which I first restored the previous state of /var/backups before running cloudrons restore.

Autorestic is taking care of retention and streamlining the sftp backend use. I even use it to make regular snapshots of the appsdata and boxdata directories in the yellowtent home.

The benefit of the hook would be the extended piece of mind that as soon als cloudron has finished the backup, it is pushed to its remote location.

@girish said in Backup Improvements: Restic Backend:

This will cost us real money because people will ask for a refund

Yes, restore of backups is crucial. Luckily so far cloudron has not let me down and overall it has been a very stable experience.

[necrevistonnezr]

@fbartels said in Backup Improvements: Restic Backend:

I have set up a few cloudrons in the last week with a combination of local disk rsync in cloudron (with local retention and hardlinks) and then using autorestic and Cron to push the cloudron backup via sftp to a hetzner storageboxes (optionally as a subuser). Have even performed a restore test, for which I first restored the previous state of /var/backups before running cloudrons restore.

@fbartels Exactly my setup for a couple of years: https://forum.cloudron.io/topic/6928/tutorial-remote-backup-of-local-cloudron-backup-snapshots-with-restic-rclone/
What‘s nice is that you can e.g. check and restore files on a different machine running restic & rclone.

[robi]

@girish said in Backup Improvements: Restic Backend:

I do know that people want urgent fixes when backups and restores are not working,

Yes, however be aware of fear based thinking here. It's not the end of the world, previous backups exist and the situation is temporary.

I just don't know how we can take up this responsibility.

It isn't your responsibility, even though you empathize and do a lot for us to make it easier. External backups are an external responsibility and best effort support here, which you do well. So, no fear.

If my production site is down and it doesn't restore, what now? This will cost us real money because people will ask for a refund.

It's like any other issue, you and we will find a way. This is the way.
Again, avoid decisions out of fear. And no, it will not cost you money (you're not hurting there), as it's not a Cloudron issue, but an external one.

You can relax and trust your loyal community to show you the way forward, as @fbartels and @necrevistonnezr already have.

[girish]

@necrevistonnezr that's an excellent post which I forgot about! I just proceeded to set up a backup of my laptop with restic+minio. Let's see how it goes!