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I'm thinking of migrating all our documents and spreadsheets infrastrucure from and old standalone samba server to one of those popular self-hosted solutions and I'm trying to do the best long-lasting error prone easy (re)install. I've made it easy to do the first installation with own docker-compose file based on examples.

It has a multitude of containers, which includes db, web server, certificates generator and validator.

That looks very complex to backup for a Docker newbie like me, specially as some websites says that I shouldn't even touch /var/lib/docker/volumes/ and I'm afraid package managers or docker install/updates could break it.

To me it looks that the faster and easier way is simple to:

  • systemctl stop docker

  • docker save(s);docker export(s) containers to tars

  • clonezilla /dev/sdb1 to an image or disk of same size (if /var/lib/docker/volumes/ is mounted in /dev/sdb1)

and into the new server of future machine when needed:

  • restore clonezilla image/device and mount it in /var/lib/docker/volumes
  • install and start docker
  • docker load(s); docker import(s) tars

I fear maybe the db container wouldn't connect to it's volume and I would lose logins and versioning, but losing files is harder from what it seems.

From what I understand too sector by sector partition copies takes minutes where millions of files cp -R would take hours, and those steps make me feel really safer to re-run the docker-compose to update db and web engines as facing it to the web needs it secure and patched

What you think is safer -fast would be good, but not really necessary- or am I safe enough?

Thank you!

Fernando Mengel
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1 Answers1

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Is using Volume mounts mandatory? If not you should check Bind mounts. Simply take the file system from Server A, copy it to Server B and mount it as Bind mount.

On the positive side the migration effort is minimal and you have the possibility to store it wherever you want on the server. No need to store it in /var/lib/docker/volumes. On the negative side you need to take care of user and group IDs and permissions. Depending on your setup this could result in a bit more effort.

C.B.
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