New post:

[_elena@mastodon.social]

New post:

"A newbie's guide to self-hosting with #YunoHost. Part 4: backups"

🔗 : https://blog.elenarossini.com/a-newbies-guide-to-self-hosting-with-yunohost-part-4-backups/

Or: this is how newbies do it.

Dear sysadmins, you have all my respect and admiration, truly. One day I will learn how to do incremental backups with Borg, I promise.

#blog #sysadmin #selfhosting

[ainmosni@social.ainmosni.eu]

@_elena Backing up, no matter how you do it, is important, what is even more important is that you test the restoration of your backups. There's a saying that says that an untested backup is no backup at all.

Also, I would recommend you look at restic over borg, as it's a more modern backup solution that has a very well audited encryption setup. Also, it's easy to setup with autorestic.

[ticho@mas.to]

@_elena "Side note: I had to delete all my backups to simulate what the screen would look like for a new user and let me tell you... I was delighted to create a new backup right away (sigh of relief)."

...cue the suspense music from any decent horror movie. :)

[_elena@mastodon.social]

@ainmosni thank you for the feedback Daniël. May I add your advice to my blog post?

[mensrea@freeradical.zone]

@_elena

https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/y-u-no-guy

[ainmosni@social.ainmosni.eu]

@_elena Of course!

[_elena@mastodon.social]

@mensrea OMG 😂😂😂

[_elena@mastodon.social]

@ainmosni I'm looking after my little one who's home from school with a fever... will try to get to it ASAP.

Thanks again for the brilliant feedback

[ainmosni@social.ainmosni.eu]

@_elena No rush, if I my executive dysfunction would ever let me, I might sometime write a blog post about my own self hosted setup.

[leonieke@squilla.vitaulium.eu]

@ainmosni @_elena I'd look forward to both versions (big one on my todo list, incl testing the backup)

[clement_moignard@piaille.fr]

@_elena excellent, thank you very much. I think I will follow your advice.

[gossen@feddie.gossen.nohost.me]

@_elena
Hi Elena,

Just my 2 cents. I run Yuno for a lot off services. One is next cloud, which contains a lot of data (over 1 terabyte) If I use the yuno backup option I need a huge drive just to do the backup. So now I just shutdown the server, take out the physical nvme drive and connect it to my laptop. Then I use dd to make an exact 1:1 copy of the entire disk. This image is synced to different locations. Maybe this is useful to some folx. Thank you for your continued sharing. 👍👍

[patpro@social.patpro.net]

@ainmosni @_elena

That was my first comment too: you’ll have to test your backups otherwise you don’t know if you have backups :)
It’s a Schrödinger’s cat type of problem −> you have to open the box.

And it leads me to a second aspect: automation. good backup processes (the one that brings piece of mind) are automated. And of course the backup check can be automated too.
It’s piece of cake for a backup solution that you can script (borg, restic, kopia, rsync, etc.) but frankly I don’t know about Yunohost, may be you can’t do better.

On the side, I’ll share one of my sysadmin fails: I had a finely tuned backup process with scripts/config/etc. that was running daily for years flawlessly. Someday I leveraged that backup as a source of data to do a server migration (shutdown old system, start new one, restore data from backup). That worked great. Then I tested some web apps: epic failure (missing MySQL tables). What could have gone wrong?
Answer: I had setup my backup script to ignore files named */mysql/*log* because I don’t want to backup MySQL log files. Not so much of a surprise: this element of config instructed my backup process to exclude database files named like dc_log.MYD or oc_login_address.ibd (and many others).
Of course I had another way to retrieve the missing data. But, hell, I was not comfortable.

[titus@gts.pijean.ovh]

@ticho @_elena, you could have opened your browser's dev tools (with F12), and hack into the page to "delete" the backups by deleting the nodes (they are all in `<a ...>...</a>` tags). That way, you only give the impression there is no backup, but a simple page refresh would make them reappear. 😉

[edwing@mstdn.moimeme.ca]

@_elena
> Fun fact - and sorry I'm addressing this point only now but the right way to pronounce "YunoHost" is Why-You-No-Host (Y-U-NO-Host). In the first couple of months of using the service I routinely mispronounced it YoU-No-Host.

I have already learned something today and it’s not even 7a! 😆

[_elena@mastodon.social]

@titus @ticho haha thank you!!!

I'm glad I won't have to do it ever again though 😅

[kfdm@social.tsun.co]

@_elena I laugh at your ‘trigger warning for sysadmins’ but also sadly know why you have to. I do hope it triggers some in a way that helps developers empathize with ‘normal’ people more, and work on sanding off more rough edges.
Thanks again for your posts. I think they provide a nice window to see how software works for other groups of people :)

[_elena@mastodon.social]

@tootbrute second recommendation of the day for Restic, I’m intrigued. Thank you! 🙏