selfhosted-templates/homelab/maintenance.org

Homelab Maintenance

• Backup
  • Local Backup
  • Remote Backup
• Updates

Backup

Since all important (persistent) data will be stored inside this directory (uploaded files are in the data directory), backing up that data to multiple locations is very important.

To be more specific, the rule goes something like: "If data does not exist in at least 3 physical drives, and at least 2 geographically separated locations, then it does not exist." It is a good idea to set up:

• A local backup on a separate SSD or flash drive

  • This protects against your main hard drive failing
  • Additionally, if it is disconnected, this protects against ransomware and/or other hacks where access to data is compromised by an attacker

• A remote backup in the cloud (or someone else's computer)

  • This protects you against a home disaster such as fire, flooding, theft

Local Backup

A local backup is quickly and easily achieved with a tool like rsync, which incrementally transfers data (only transfers changes). This means that the first backup might take a few hours or days, but subsequent backups can take a mere seconds or minutes. For file versioning, you can go a step further and use something like rdiff-backup, which creates backup versions, but leverages rsync in the background for performance.

For privacy and security, backups should be encrypted. For this, you can either backup the encrypted crypt directory to a flash drive or SSD, or backup the decrypted plain directory to an SSD or flash drive with block encryption. The block encryption method has the added benefit of masking file directory structures and relative file sizes.

Remote Backup

An ideal remote backup would involve directly controlling the remote computer via SFTP and backing up with rdiff-backup. However, most cloud storage solutions don't allow you to do this. As a viable alternative, remote backups can easily be achieved with rclone.

To setup rclone for a particular cloud provider run

sudo rclone config

Then, to backup the encrypted gocryptfs storage:

sudo rclone sync --exclude=gocryptfs.conf crypt yourbackup:/backup

Updates

Regular updates are very important, especially for publicly accessible apps. Updates can be applied by stopping the containers, pulling new images and starting the containers up again:

sudo docker-compose stop
sudo docker-compose pull
sudo docker-compose up -d
#+BEGIN_SRC

Old Docker images from previous updates can be pruned after verifying the updated containers are working as expected:
#+BEGIN_SRC sh :noexec
sudo docker image prune