Who else is hosting their Cloudron server on Hetzner Cloud? How best to do backups on Hetzner?

[jdaviescoates]

I've got Cloudron installed on a Hetzner VPS cloud server:
https://www.hetzner.com/cloud

I'm not sure what to do about backups...(although I do know that I also want them to be on Hetzner - I love them because they are 1) very cheap, and 2) 100% powered by renewable energy)

From the documentation it seems I should use the Filesystem method, but I'm not exactly clear on how to go about doing that...

In part this is because I'm not where on Hetzner to store the backups...

I could add a Hetzner Cloud Volume to my VPS:

What are the Hetzner Cloud Volumes?

It is a feature for fast, flexible, and cost-effective (SSD based) block storage which you can attach to your Hetzner Cloud Server.
How does Hetzner Online store the data in volumes?

Every block of data is stored on three different physical servers (triple replication).

https://www.hetzner.com/cloud#volumes

Or I could buy a Hetzner storage box:
https://www.hetzner.com/storage/storage-box

Or I guess could just buy another VPS in a different geographic location.

Or maybe I shouldn't worry about Cloudron powered backups at all and should just pay Hetzner 20% of my VPS package for their backup service? (what are the downsides of this?)

Or maybe I should do both? (i.e. pay Hetzner for their backup service AND also store Cloudron generated backups somewhere on Hetzner too)

I'm probably over thinking! But any help/ guidance/ suggestions that would help me answer these questions and/ or rule out some of the options very warmly received

[jdaviescoates]

Hmz, guess perhaps this should've been in support instead? But can't see how to change that now...

[jdaviescoates]

This post is deleted!

[luckow]

@jdaviescoates good questions

I have no experience with the Hetzner Cloud. So my answer is more or less a generic answer to a backup strategie.

I use snapshots provided by the provider for disaster recovery. If everything is broken, I can restore the complete image. Maybe the Hetzner backup service is a kind of "snapshot" (a solution to restore the complete server including all data).

I use the Cloudron backup (important for me: to a different storage (not the local files system) - mostly minio / S3) to backup all individual apps & the configuration of my Cloudron instance. This gives me the possibility

• clone my apps (in case of testing an update on a cloned app-instance before I update the app in a productive environment)
• restore all or some apps to another server, perhaps in a different hosting environment.

For your topic "over thinking": do you have a backup strategie for your backups on a backup server?

So in short:
For me, a backup from my provider is a solution for disaster recovery of the complete Cloudron instance in the infrastructure of the hoster.
Cloudron backups give me the possibility to restore some apps, clone them or switch to another hosting provider.

[jdaviescoates]

@luckow said in Who else is hosting their Cloudron server on Hetzner Cloud? How best to do backups on Hetzner?:

Maybe the Hetzner backup service is a kind of "snapshot" (a solution to restore the complete server including all data).

Ha, in fact "snapshots" are yet another option that Hetzner provides in addition to their backup service! So you've added another option to consider rather than eliminating any! hahaha

But thanks anyways for your thoughts

I don't really have a strategy of any kind yet, but I guess I'll end up with something like you've got in place too... just need to decide where/ how to do all those different backups!

[nebulon]

I can recommend their storage boxes and then using samba to mount it onto your server for backups: https://cloudron.io/documentation/backups/#sambacifs

[jdaviescoates]

@nebulon gah, I was just about to go ahead and use a Volume instead! But thanks anyway

I think I will go ahead and try using their Volumes anyway as pricing isn't that different and it's all done within their cloud console so keeps everything in one place and easy to manage.

Volumes are in effect external SSD hard drives and live on different physical infrastructure and are triple replicated so all in all seems like a good option... one thing I'm unsure about though is how much space I'll actually need for my Cloudron backs given they only back-up database and app user data?

Was about to post a new thread in support asking this when I saw the notification about your post...

[girish]

A bit of a tangent, but I wanted to emphasize that snapshots are not backups. For example, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22001822 where Gandi advertised it's snapshots are backups but the whole rack got bad and they lost all the servers and the backups just last week. A backup strategy should ideally always be in another service provider even, if possible. This avoids cases where a lockout of your account removes access to all your data entirely.

[jdaviescoates]

@girish said in Who else is hosting their Cloudron server on Hetzner Cloud? How best to do backups on Hetzner?:

A backup strategy should ideally always be in another service provider even, if possible. This avoids cases where a lockout of your account removes access to all your data entirely.

Hmz, good point.

I guess I had better find another good value vps provider that runs on 100% renewable energy then... I know https://1984hosting.com/ do (they aren't quite as cheap but I do I've actually already got a VPS with them where I host my Sandstorm server), so perhaps I'll try using them for backups...

Anyone know of any others? I really don't want to use any of the big tech giants nor anyone who doesn't use 100% renewable energy

[timmeh]

@jdaviescoates NetCup is 100% green https://www.netcup.eu/ueber-netcup/oekostrom.php

[jdaviescoates]

@timmeh great, thanks! If it weren't for the 12 months billing I'd probably sign-up straight away to try them out (hourly billing is one of the things I like about Hetzner)... seems like they could be perfect!

Have you used them/ do you use them? Or perhaps even work for them?

[jdaviescoates]

@jdaviescoates said in Who else is hosting their Cloudron server on Hetzner Cloud? How best to do backups on Hetzner?:

seems like they could be perfect

Hmz, aside from the fact they seem to arbitrarily limit which languages can be used etc.

[pratik]

I use rclone to sync Cloudron backups to Mega once a day.
You could indeed "rclone mount" Mega and directly sync to it, but it increases the cache size on the server and potential for error is pretty high.

[timmeh]

@jdaviescoates I use them for my own Cloudron instance! Works like a charm, they even have 18.04 with preinstalled Cloudron images so it was zero effort for setup I run my backups somewhere else though, so not sure about those.

[jdaviescoates]

@timmeh where do you run your backups?

[timmeh]

@jdaviescoates My backups go via Scaleway. Was easy to setup because there was a Cloudron preset and guide for it, and it's free up to 75GBs AFAIK not green though..

[JOduMonT]

@jdaviescoates said in Who else is hosting their Cloudron server on Hetzner Cloud? How best to do backups on Hetzner?:

use a Volume instead!

it's often the option I choose

[marcusquinn]

https://wasabi.com & https://www.backblaze.com/b2/cloud-storage.html are both decent S3 compatible options for relatively cheap provider redundancy.

[girish]

Since B2 recently added S3 compat, we will add it at some point - https://git.cloudron.io/cloudron/box/-/issues/508 . I did test this out a month ago and it was very slow, so I will give them sometime to ramp up. At this point, if you want to test, you can always use the "S3 compatible" as the option in the provider field in Cloudron Backups view.

[marcusquinn]

@girish Thanks, just tested both tarball and rsync options with B2 and both worked fine.

For interest: Tarball was fast. Rsync completed but I triggered before going to zzz, so no idea.