Backups

The homelab is intended to be a place to make mistakes, and this is good because I make my fair share number of them. Today’s mistakes involved inconsistant databases, ChatGPT, and (thankfully!) usefull backups to save the day! I’ll walk you through the incident the same way I experienced it. It began as I was working to deploy a new service (yes, ANOTHER one), this time a bookmarking app called Karakeep. It has OIDC suport, so I went to Authentik to setup the connection. I was intially met with the normal login screen, but after I typed in my username and password I was then met with a generic “Server Error” message. “That’s odd” I muttered as I tried logging in through a private window and with a different account. All three attemts resulting in the same “Server Error” message. ...

I have a modest homelab, only a few hundred gigabytes of content that doesn’t change often. Most of the content is not really that important, but I back it up anyways because, hey, storage costs are pretty low. I use BackBlaze B2, which is about $6/TB, which I am easily under. So you’ll image my surprise when my February bill came from BackBlaze, and it was for $103.91. Yup, I went from spending about $2.50, to over one hundred dollars in about a month. How? ...

Welp, I’m ready to start writing my backup script! I ended up using Python, mostly because I feel more comfortable using it. I considered Bash, and perhaps in the future I will convert the process to Bash. But as I said, I am more comfortable in Python, and, at least for now, think Python could be better. We shall see. Bash may be more ubiquitous, but I’m not planning on ever running this on any exotic hardware, so Python is a reasonable requirment. ...

Backups are like oral hygiene. Everyone knows they’re important and most people are doing something, but very few people are actually putting in the effort to do it completely. They’ve always been on my TODO list, but other things have always caught my attention and distracted me from this all-important endeavor. Plus, I was honestly kinda scared to dive into the proper way of doing Docker Volume and database backups; everything is working fine for now, why change it? ...