The Pragmatic Backup Strategy for Home Servers

Prioritizing Your Data

Right now, my backup strategy is simple and strictly prioritized. Because my movies and series are easily replaceable, I do not waste expensive hard drive space backing them up.

However, my Immich photo library contains irreplaceable family memories. That is the only data I meticulously back up to a disconnected, external hard drive that I keep safely stored away.

Automating Backups with Rsync

When I eventually upgrade my hardware and resources, I plan to migrate to a full automated backup server. For now, a simple rsync script mapped to a Cron job works perfectly to push critical Docker appdata (like passwords and database configs) to a secure secondary location. If cron syntax gives you a headache, paste your schedule into the crontab translator to confirm exactly when it runs before trusting it with your backups.

# Example backup command
rsync -aP /opt/docker /mnt/external_backup/