Does it make sense to backup the docker image?


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Since it's always changing, it gets flagged for backup every night by Crashplan. At this rate, at 20 GB a night, I'm going to have over 600GB in versions of the same file in a month's time. It also extends my backup time by some margin.

 

Does this even need to be backed up? We all already know that settings, configs, and other data for dockers are in appdata, and from what I can tell, templates for previously installed dockers are stored on flash. I'm already backing up both of these locations, so really if I were to lose my cache drive, I could theoretically rebuild all of my dockers from those templates and appdata really easily.

 

That being said, is there any reason at all why I should be backing up the image?

Edited by Phastor
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The whole idea of Dockers is that they contain functioning code and no configuration data.

 

With the docker templates stored on your flash, you can rebuild them very fast. I recently recreated my docker on a fresh SSD. Took about 10 minutes.

 

I'd focus your backups on your irretrievable data. I'd probably including the "appdata" share on the cache, at least for some Dockers. If you have VMs (domains share), you might want to periodically back them up as well. But they can be big and it really depends on how much time it would take you to reconstruct. Even with VMs, you should be externalizing your data onto the array so backing them up may very well not be necessary, at least not very often.

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I'd focus your backups on your irretrievable data. I'd probably including the "appdata" share on the cache

 

Yup! This is what I was thinking. I've got appdata and my flash already backed up on a nightly schedule. I'll remove the docker image from backup then.

 

As far as VMs, I don't have any yet. I'll probably spin up an ARK and Minecraft server sometime down the road. I might not map their data to an unRAID share directly, but I do plan for them to back up their world files on a regular basis somewhere to a share, which will then get picked up by Crashplan. I wouldn't backup the VMs themselves then since it shouldn't be too difficult to spin up new ones and restore their data.

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  • 2 years later...
how does backup store docker container settings? I lost unraid 3 times now and have to fill inn correctly every time. Have to remember every settings. 

Often it is recommended that the docker.img file be deleted and recreated to solve docker related issues; however, even if a docker container is simply removed without deleting the docker.img file, any and all previously installed docker containers can be reinstalled with ALL prior settings intact through the Previous Apps section in Community Applications (Apps tab in the GUI)

 

 

Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

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  • 2 weeks later...
  • 7 months later...
On 4/26/2020 at 9:42 PM, Hoopster said:

...any and all previously installed docker containers can be reinstalled with ALL prior settings intact through the Previous Apps section in Community Applications (Apps tab in the GUI)

Thank you! I've managed to corrupt my docker image a couple of times. This is going to be a life saver.

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  • 8 months later...
On 7/11/2017 at 9:59 PM, JonathanM said:

No.

I setup a sharelatex container.

I install texlive-full by attach to the console of the container.

Then I commit the container and revise the docker template to use the local image.

Is the local image stored in docker.img?

If I do not backup docker.img, will I be able to have the texlive-full local docker image?

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