Hi all
I’m running several docker containers with local persistent volumes that I would like to backup. I haven’t found an easy method to do so.
What do you use / recommend to do that? AFAIK you can’t just rsync the volume directory while the container is running.
Use bind mounts instead of docker volumes. Then you just have normal directories to back up, the same as you would anything else.
This is your answer. It also has the benefit of allowing you to have a nice folder structure for your Docker setup, where you have a folder for each service holding the corresponding compose yaml and data folder(s)
it’s better to stop the service mounting those volumes before backing them up or you may break something with hot backup
Rsync works fine for most data. (I use borgbackup) For any database data, create a dump using pg_dump or mysqldump or whatever. Then backup the dump and all other volumes but exclude the db volume.
You can copy data from docker volumes to somewhere on the host node to do the backup from there. You can also have a container using the volumes and from there you can send directly to remote, or map a dorectory on the host node to copy the files to.
If you are running a database or something stateful, look at best practices for backup and then adjust to it.
Or not use volumes and map onto the host node directly. each works, and had its own advantages/disadvantages.
I personally use a script which stops all containers, rsyncs the bind mounts (normal folders on the filesystem) and then restarts them. It runs every night so it isn’t a problem that services are down for a few minutes.
Ideally, you would also make a database dump instead of just backing up the bind mounts.
Bind mounts are easy to maintain and backup. However if you share data amongst multiple container docker volumes are recommend especially for managing state.
Backup volumes:
docker run --rm --volumes-from dbstore -v $(pwd):/backup containername tar cvf /backup/backup.tar /dbdata- Launch a new container and mount the volume from the dbstore container
- Mount a local host directory as /backup
- Pass a command that tars the contents of the dbdata volume to a backup.tar file inside /backup directory.
Database volume backup without stopping the service: bash into the container, dump it, and copy it out with docker cp. Run it periodically via crontab
