Ask HN: What do you use to backup your VMs?

• wal-e

  8 3,457 3.0 Python

  Continuous Archiving for Postgres

  

  For me, it's case-by-case. I don't back up the VMs directly, just the date of the stateful applications running on the VMs (or bare metal servers, I do identical stuff for them).

  For postgres, I used to just have a systemd timer that would `pg_dumpall` and throw it in s3.

  Now I use https://github.com/wal-e/wal-e to backup my postgresql databases.

  For other local files, I use borg backup for personal files and services I just run for myself, and I use restic to backup server files to s3.

  The operating system's configuration is all stored in git via the magic of NixOS, so I don't have to worry about files in /etc, they all are 100% reproducible from my NixOS configuration.

• SaaSHub

  www.saashub.com featured

  SaaSHub - Software Alternatives and Reviews. SaaSHub helps you find the best software and product alternatives

  

• sanoid

  119 3,194 6.9 Perl

  These are policy-driven snapshot management and replication tools which use OpenZFS for underlying next-gen storage. (Btrfs support plans are shelved unless and until btrfs becomes reliable.)

  ZFS Offsite Backup configured using Syncoid [1] in pull mode. My backup server is started weekly using a pre-configured Shelly Plug. After boot, it connects to the main server, pulls latest ZFS Snapshots, does a ZFS scrub, sends an email for confirmation to me, and shuts down. The Shelly Plug-S is configured in a Home Assistant automation to shut off power completely if under 10W for 10 Minutes.

  The advantage of this setup is that the Backup server does not need to know the encryption keys for ZFS. It can pull snapshots without knowing keys (i.e. zero trust).

  [1]: https://github.com/jimsalterjrs/sanoid/blob/master/syncoid

• Backuppc

  6 1,398 0.0 Perl

  BackupPC is a high-performance, enterprise-grade system for backing up to a server's disk.

  

  I really liked BackupPC when it was being worked on: https://backuppc.github.io/backuppc/ and https://github.com/backuppc/backuppc

  Sadly, despite being pretty great (doing deduplicated and compressed incremental backups across a bunch of nodes, allowing browsing the backups and restoring them also being easy), the project is more or less abandoned: https://github.com/backuppc/backuppc/issues/518

  Nowadays it's mostly just rsync and some compression for archives, sometimes just putting them in an S3 compatible store, or using whatever the VPS provider gives me. I'm not really happy with either approach, they feel insufficient.

  It's not like there aren't other options out there: UrBackup, Bacula, Duplicati, BorgBackup, restic, Kopia and others, it's just that I haven't had the time or energy to truly dive into them and compare them all, to make the decision of what I should move to.

• nix-postgres-docker

  1 1 8.7 Shell

  notes on running walg w postgres in a container

  shameless plug

  wrote a elaborate doc on using wal-g on nixos, might be useful if someone finds themselves in same boat. has some catches.

  https://github.com/geekodour/nix-postgres-docker

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