How I Safeguard Essential Data in My Homelab with Off-site Backup on Cloud

Introduction

Imagine this - You’ve spent countless hours building and fine-tuning your homelab, creating the perfect digital sanctuary for your experiments and projects. It houses critical databases, sensitive data, and maybe even those important backups of your services you can’t afford to lose.

Now, think about what would happen if disaster struck - a hard drive failure, a power surge, or even a simple human error. That’s why backups in a homelab are not just a good idea; they’re a necessity.

A while back I asked a question on reddit of self hosting password managers and the general consensus was that if you are self hosting one on premise then you absolutely cannot compromise on taking backups.

Hence I started exploring options of taking off-site backups of my homelab data. In this blog, I’m going to share with you how I ensure the safety of my homelab’s essential data using off-site cloud storage, and the tools that make it all possible.

My Backup Strategy

There are essentially two pieces to my backup strategy:

1. Local backups - I take local backups of my homelab data on a regular basis. This includes my databases, important files, and even my password manager’s database.

2. Off-site backups - For off-site backups I use rclone ↗️ to sync my local backups to cloud storage (Google Drive currently).

Let’s break each section into more detail.

Local Backups

Taking local backups is the first step in my backup strategy. This basically means that whatever data I have in my homelab which requires regular backups, I perform their backup strategy, for example a database dump or a service backup file and then move it to a local folder (~/backups in my case).

So in simple terms the first step is to move your backups to a source folder which we will then sync to the cloud. How you push your backups to this folder is up to you. You can use a cron job, a systemd timer, or even a simple bash script.

Off-site Backups

Once I have my local backups in place, I use rclone ↗️ to sync them to my cloud storage. I use Google Drive for this purpose, but you can use any cloud storage provider ↗️ that rclone supports.

Rclone is an awesome tool that lets you sync files and directories to and from cloud storage providers. It supports a wide range of cloud storage providers, including Google Drive, Dropbox, Amazon S3, and more.

I have a detailed guide on how you can setup and use rclone to sync your backups to cloud storage.

Automating the Backup Process

Now that we have our backup strategy in place, let’s automate the process of taking backups and syncing them to the cloud. You can take advantage of platforms such as Power Automate ↗️ for this however I prefer to keep it simple and use a bash script.

This is what the bash script should do:

• On startup, sync everything from the backups source folder to the cloud storage.
• Everytime something changes in the backups folder, sync that file/folder to the cloud storage.

The first part is pretty simple with rclone. We can use the rclone copy command to copy everything from the source folder to the cloud storage.

To tackle the second part, I use the inotifywait tool which comes from the inotify-tools package. This tool lets you monitor file system events, such as when a file is created, modified, or deleted.

With this, I can monitor the backups folder for any changes, and then sync the changed file/folder to the cloud storage.

Here’s the script that I am using currently:

#!/bin/bash

# Define the source directory and the remote destination
SOURCE_DIR="$HOME/backups"
DESTINATION_DIR="gdrive:"

# Function to sync the source directory to the destination
sync_changes() {
    source_dir="$1"
    destination="$2"

    echo "Synching $source_dir to $destination"

    rclone copy "$source_dir" "$destination" --progress
}

# Initial sync of the source directory to the destination
sync_changes "$SOURCE_DIR" "$DESTINATION_DIR"

# Monitor for changes using inotifywait
inotifywait -m -e create,modify,move -r "$SOURCE_DIR" |
while read -r directory event filename; do
    # Exclude temporary files
    if [ -f "$directory$filename" ] && [[ ! "$filename" =~ \.tmp$ ]]; then
        relative_path="${directory#$SOURCE_DIR}"
        destination_path="$DESTINATION_DIR$relative_path"

        sync_changes "$directory$filename" "$destination_path"
    fi
done

Install the inotify-tools package using your package manager, and then save the above script as rclone-backup.sh in your preferred location.

Make sure to change the SOURCE_DIR and DESTINATION_DIR variables to match your setup.

Now, we need to make sure that this script runs on startup, and also restarts automatically if it crashes. For this, we can use systemd to run the script as a service.

Create a new service file at /etc/systemd/system/rclone-backup.service with the following contents:

[Unit]
Description=RClone Backup Service
After=network.target

[Service]
Type=simple
ExecStart=/path/to/rclone-backup.sh
Restart=always
RestartSec=5
User=<username>

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target

Make sure to replace the ExecStart and User values with the correct path to the script and your username respectively.

Now, enable the service and start it:

sudo systemctl enable rclone-backup.service
sudo systemctl start rclone-backup.service

That’s it! Now, your backups will be automatically synced to the cloud whenever you make any changes to the backups folder 🥳. You can also check the status of the service using the following command:

sudo systemctl status rclone-backup.service

Conclusion

The importance of backups cannot be overstated. They are the only thing that stands between you and a complete loss of data. That’s why it’s important to have a solid backup strategy in place, and to make sure that you’re taking regular backups of your data.

I hope this blog post has given you some ideas on how you can safeguard your homelab’s data using off-site backups. If you have any questions or suggestions, feel free to reach out to me on Twitter ↗️.

Until next time, happy hacking! 👋