I emailed support about this, and they replied telling me they had adjusted some configuration to try to fix the problem. Seems like it was an unintended result of some other change.

Just remember any backup is better than nothing.

This is comforting.

There are several reasons to backup data only and not the full system. First you may be unable to find a computer exactly/enough like the one that broke, and so the old system backup won’t even run. Second, even if you can find an identical enough system, do you want to, or maybe it is time to upgrade anyway - there are pros and cons of arm (raspberry pi) vs x86 servers (there are other obscure options you might want but those are the main ones), and you may want to switch anyway since you have. Third, odds are some of the services need to be upgraded and so you may as well use this forced computer time to apply the upgrade. Last, you may change how many servers you have, should you split services to different computers, or maybe consolidate the services on the system that died to some other server you already have.

Some good things to consider here. Whether or not I’ll want to upgrade will depend on how far this theoretical failure is. If storage fails, I might just replace that and restore the backup. If it’s something more significant than that and we’re 2-3 years down the line, I’ll probably look at an upgrade. If it’s less than that, I might just replace with the same to keep things simple.

I guess one other upside of the full system backup is that I could restore just the data out of it if I decide to upgrade when some hardware fails, but I don’t have the reverse flexibility (to do a full system restore) if I opt for a data-only backup.

If you don’t have the budget for on-premises backup, you almost certainly can’t afford to restore the cloud backup if anything goes wrong.

I believe egress is free on Backblaze B2.

Just make sure to test the restore procedure once in a while.

Good call on this. Curious if you have a procedure for actually doing this. I could just wipe out my system and rebuild it from the backup, but then I’m in trouble if it fails. What does a proper test of a backup actually look like?

Check out Borgbase, it’s very cheap and it’s an actual backup solution, so it offers some features you won’t get from Google drive or whatever you were considering using e.g. deduplication, recover data at different points in time and have the data be encrypted so there’s no way for them to access it.

I looked at Borgbase, but I think it will be a bit more pricey than Restic + Backblaze B2. Looks like Borgbase is $80/year for 1TB, which would be $72/year on B2 and less if I don’t use all of 1TB.

The vast majority of your system is the same as it would be if you install fresh, so you’re wasting backup space in storing data you can easily recover in other ways.

I get this, but it would be faster to restore, right? And the storage I’m going to use to store these files is relatively little compared to the overall volume of data I’m backing up. For example, I’m backing up 100GB of personal photos and home movies. Backing up the system, even though strictly not necessary, will be something like 5% of this, I think, and I’d lean toward paying another few cents every month for a faster restore.

Thanks for your thoughts on the database backups. It’s a helpful perspective!

Much simpler than my solution. I’ll look into this. Thank you!

Is your script something you can share? I’d love to see your approach. I can definitely live with a few minutes of down time in the early morning.

Had considered a device with some storage at a family member’s house, but then I’d have to maintain that, fix it if it goes down, replace it if it breaks, etc. I think I’d prefer a small monthly fee for now, even if it may work out more expensive in the long run.

Good call on the cost calculation. I’ll take another look at those factors…

If that’s the main downside to a full-system backup, I might go ahead and try it. I’ll check out Backrest too. Looks great!

Much easier than what I was trying to do. Thank you!

OK, cool. That’s helpful. Thank you!

I know in general you can just grab a docker volume and then point at it with a new container later, but I was under the impression that backing up a database in particular in this way could leave you with a database in a bad state after restoring. Fingers crossed that was just bad info. 😅