If you were scheduling both Duplicati backups and Watchtower updates to run nightly, which would you run first? reddit / selfhosted ---------------------------------------------------------------------- CactusBoyScout · 2023-11-25 16:15 On the one hand, if I run Duplicati first, I can roll back to a previous version if there's an issue with an update. On the other hand, if I run Watchtower first, I'm backing up the latest version. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- primevaldark · 2023-11-25 16:17 Backup first! ---------------------------------------------------------------------- fedroxx · 2023-11-25 16:34 Have you tested your duplicati backups? I'd start by not using it because it works fine as long as you don't need to restore. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- CactusBoyScout · 2023-11-25 16:35 I have not. What are the issues with Duplicati and what do you recommend instead? ---------------------------------------------------------------------- sk1nT7 · 2023-11-25 17:01 Unsure why duplicati gets so much hate. I am using it since a few years now and haven't had any failures with backups or restoring. Of course, ensuring the proper permissions of duplicati is crucial. Also the general backup process - especially for databases, which may get locked. I use TrueNAS Core with ZFS to store all my data. Duplicati runs backups against this data storage and puts the encrypted backups into the cloud. No problems at all. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Richmondez · 2023-11-25 17:30 Next you'll be telling people not to save their backups to write only memory. When I can write as quickly as I can to /dev/null to other media I'll listen. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Simplixt · 2023-11-25 17:48 *"On the other hand, if I run Watchtower first, I'm backing up the latest version."* This makes no sense. I hope you are backing up the persistent data, not the Docker-Images. So before and after Watchtower is identically in the best case scenario. (In the worst case scenario, after the docker update your persistent data are corrupted.) ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Mintfresh22 · 2023-11-25 18:50 Why would you want to do that? ---------------------------------------------------------------------- fedroxx · 2023-11-25 19:53 > Unsure why Duplicati gets so much hate. I am using it since a few years now and haven't had any failures with backups or restoring. ....because of the volume of people complaining about being able to restore their backups? I was an ardent supporter, and almost got burnt but thankfully I didn't fully put my trust in it -- even with loads of testing. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Vyerni11 · 2023-11-25 19:56 Test, and its fine. I've done many successful restores from it. In fact, my process is doing a full disaster recovery test every 6 months to ensure data, and procedure works smoothly. I think the fault comes when people backup (and therefore restore), the duplicati config data itself. Exclude that from backups ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Vyerni11 · 2023-11-25 19:57 Test, and its fine. I've done many successful restores from it. In fact, my process is doing a full disaster recovery test every 6 months to ensure data, and procedure works smoothly. I think the fault comes when people backup (and therefore restore), the duplicati config data itself. Exclude that from backups ---------------------------------------------------------------------- fedroxx · 2023-11-25 20:02 I'd recommend starting [here](https://github.com/awesome-foss/awesome- sysadmin#backups). I use a mixture of rclone + rsync, heavily customized PowerShell scripts with robocopy, and Duplicacy (best $20 I ever spent). Take it from someone who almost lost 10TB of critical family archives: **test your backups**. ***Repeatedly***. Write out the test variables, and make sure it performs exactly the way you need. It only takes 1 failure. You'll be on forums like a lot of people hoping to get your data back. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- redoverture · 2023-11-25 22:47 Updates can modify persistent data to be non backwards compatible anyways, so it’s even more important to back up beforehand ---------------------------------------------------------------------- CactusBoyScout · 2023-11-26 21:55 Okay so I've got Duplicacy setup. Thank you for the recommendation. One quick question... I was told in another thread that I'm supposed to stop my Docker containers prior to backing up and I was planning to do that with cron. But I was told that I only need to stop containers that have databases? I'm not entirely sure what that means... just like a literal SQlite DB file somewhere in the persistent data?