Since all disks will fail at some point in the future, I wonder what is the recommended backup procedure for an umbrel node.
Would you recommend to commit and save the docker images to an external harddisk, or would you rather create a filesystem snapshot of the umbrel filesystem (provided there is some leftover storage in the volume group) and make a (i.e. borg) backup of the read-only mounted snapshot?
It would be nice not to interrupt the running umbrel node during backup, and to have an easy procedure to restore all the data (blockchain, lightning channels, and all other data) on a freshly setup umbrel node.
Which will only cause a very short downtime of umbrel (esp LND), because it only has to create a LVM snapshot and restarts immediately again. After the restart, I mount the snapshot and back it up (which takes less than minute without the blockchain, but could last a lot longer otherwise).
Bumping this question. Imho this is the single most important gap versus start9. Backups are critical. If I understand correctly, currently any pleb who cannot do CLI commands will lose everything except their LND node in the case of a drive failure. So if youāre running Core Lightning for instance and donāt know how to manually backup the hsm secret via CLI your lightning balance and state will be lost forever if your Umbrel dies.
Ironic that the platform that has a ābackup your macā app doesnāt back itself up at all. Iād also like to see this, and have been asking for a simplified GUI (be it text or otherwise) to save an image over the network to my NAS or an external USB drive.
Trying to help:
Iāll offer a 200k sats bounty for a community contributor* to submit a PR with safe working code for a GUI based backup to an external USB drive.
*By community contributor I mean only someone who doesnāt work for Umbrel as they shouldāve done this years ago, and I refuse to pay them to do this. I will only pay people who donāt work for Umbrel.
So if I am understaning you correctly you would rather:
pay any person other than the developers whose products youāve been using for free this whole time and
have a solution that is not fully integrated into the OS but installed via app store so that it needs constant maintenance and might potentially break when the random person leaves the project?
We might need to think about this problem a bit harder I guess. While I value your contribution I would personally rather backup via CLI before it is being integrated into the OS.
Your criticism is fair and I wholly accept it. For context I purchased a Home so I have attempted to contribute to devs. This is on me but when I purchased the product I thought this was included and was disappointed when it was not. Not saying thatās fair but just my perspective. Iād be willing be reconsider if you see a better course.
Oh, I forgot about the Homeā¦ so then my first point is not valid here of course. And I fully understand your frustration then!
I see we might need to just wait or make a full-disk images or in the vase of virtual machines doing image snapshots once in a while.
The first option might also be possible on the home, whether you can have physical access to the drive or not. But especially with the Pi5 it should be really easy to do, since it can now also boot from a usb or nvme drive.
Hey @smolgrrr does the backup, back up the entire disk. Even the bitcoin blockchain? I want to migrate to OS 1.0 on my linux machine and I am trying to figure out the most seamless way to do this
Note: The setup is not perfect - there are some file / folders Iām struggling because duplicati gets an access denied but in my case all data I care about is backed up correctly (paperless, invoice ninja).
I just wrote an article in the āguidesā section of the forum. After hitting publish i realized that it requires approval. I hope someone approves the guide quickly otherwise I will send you a link in a PM.
