Question about backup strategy of VM server

Features
1

I have a virtual server that is backed up nightly via VM snapshots. Our host only allows for daily bare metal snapshots.

I’m hoping to use Duplicati to backup files and folders to a network folder on a more regular interval… Hopefully hourly…

My question is mainly… What would happen if the server had a catastrophic failure in the middle of the day and had to be restored to the previous nights snapshot… When it got booted up would I still be able to restore from the hourly backups when in fact the Duplicati system won’t have a record of creating those backup…

Would it check the backup destination in any way to figure out if newer backups were there at all?

Any help would be greatly appreciated!

Regards, Tommy

2

Edit: Don’t do this

This would work, but you’d need to run a Repair so that the local database gets back in sync with the back end data. (Duplicati will detect that it’s out of sync and actually prompt you to repair.) Once the repair is complete, you’ll have access to the latest backups that happened after the VM snapshot, and you can then restore as needed from Duplicati.

You should definitely test this out though to make sure it works for you.

Welcome to the forum!

3

Repair command deletes remote files for new backups #3416 and issues pointing to it suggests that the out of sync might be solved in an undesired way, by deleting the “extra” remote files from newer backup, however a Recreate (delete and repair) can’t have this issue. Safer still, rename the old DB then Repair. Without a DB present, Repair (whether by button or command) has no previous DB and must recreate it.

4

@ts678 - I believe in that case they were running two separate backups to the same destination. Hopefully it would not occur with a standard, supported setup.

I definitely want to test this out.

But good call on Recreate being the safer choice, although it may take (significantly?) longer depending on which version of Duplicati is in use.

5

Also look at the two issues linked there. One is not a same-destination case, but downgrade using the backup DB. local DB downgrade will corrupt backup forever (on destination) #3223. Could use testing.

6

Well you were absolutely right. Rolling back to an older database and running repair does NOT work well. I thought I had tested that in the past, but I guess not.

Recreate works fine though.

7

Thanks for your input in this guys! I will also give it a full test to ensure I don’t lose any data if/when the time comes to rely on it :slight_smile:

8

Definitely a good idea!

The full Recreate option shouldn’t take a huge amount of time, but it might depending on your version of Duplicati. I am really hoping we get a new beta released soon that fixes some database recreation slowdowns.