I'm bringing my PeerTube (@vkc@tinkerbetter.tube) down for the morning for some maintenance.
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Current status: backing up the disk from the VPS to my backup server using dd.
Half of the downtime is just me sitting, waiting for bits to move from one cursed thing to another.
@vkc the sysadmin version of "Compiling..."
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Current status: backing up the disk from the VPS to my backup server using dd.
Half of the downtime is just me sitting, waiting for bits to move from one cursed thing to another.
Linode¹ makes dd-ing from a VPS to home reasonably simple with a rescue boot environment option included.
Boot into that, set a temporary root password (just for the session), then from home: ssh "dd if=/dev/sdX " | dd of=image.img status=progress
Guessing most other VPS' have similar tools, folks should avail themselves of it more often and back up their disk images! It's probably cheaper than paying the VPS for it.
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¹ not sponsored, but I've done work for their YouTube channel years ago -
Linode¹ makes dd-ing from a VPS to home reasonably simple with a rescue boot environment option included.
Boot into that, set a temporary root password (just for the session), then from home: ssh "dd if=/dev/sdX " | dd of=image.img status=progress
Guessing most other VPS' have similar tools, folks should avail themselves of it more often and back up their disk images! It's probably cheaper than paying the VPS for it.
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¹ not sponsored, but I've done work for their YouTube channel years ago@vkc Wow, it came never to my mind dd-ing the partition of my VPS over ssh. That's definitely useful.
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@vkc Wow, it came never to my mind dd-ing the partition of my VPS over ssh. That's definitely useful.
@marlin I've also found this useful for migrations, so like if you're moving VPS between platforms or regions within a platform. Although I think a lot of VPS services will handle the latter for you nowadays.
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Linode¹ makes dd-ing from a VPS to home reasonably simple with a rescue boot environment option included.
Boot into that, set a temporary root password (just for the session), then from home: ssh "dd if=/dev/sdX " | dd of=image.img status=progress
Guessing most other VPS' have similar tools, folks should avail themselves of it more often and back up their disk images! It's probably cheaper than paying the VPS for it.
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¹ not sponsored, but I've done work for their YouTube channel years ago@vkc hang on, I'm not quite following. Do you mean backing up your disk to the vps, or the vps's disk to your computer?
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@vkc hang on, I'm not quite following. Do you mean backing up your disk to the vps, or the vps's disk to your computer?
@esoteric_programmer the latter. Backing up your VPS as an image to your own server.
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Linode¹ makes dd-ing from a VPS to home reasonably simple with a rescue boot environment option included.
Boot into that, set a temporary root password (just for the session), then from home: ssh "dd if=/dev/sdX " | dd of=image.img status=progress
Guessing most other VPS' have similar tools, folks should avail themselves of it more often and back up their disk images! It's probably cheaper than paying the VPS for it.
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¹ not sponsored, but I've done work for their YouTube channel years ago@vkc Why do you prefer this approach to ordinary file-level backups for your VPSes? (Or is it in addition to them?)
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@vkc Why do you prefer this approach to ordinary file-level backups for your VPSes? (Or is it in addition to them?)
@amenonsen in addition!
As a sysadmin, I usually recommend taking periodic full-disk image backups.
Files are great and useful but don't always capture the whole picture of how a system is (mis)configured. I can't tell you how many times I was saved by full-disk backups. Being able to spin up a backup and examine the state can save a lot of time getting things online after an issue.
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@esoteric_programmer I prefer dd because it's what I know, old habits!
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Linode¹ makes dd-ing from a VPS to home reasonably simple with a rescue boot environment option included.
Boot into that, set a temporary root password (just for the session), then from home: ssh "dd if=/dev/sdX " | dd of=image.img status=progress
Guessing most other VPS' have similar tools, folks should avail themselves of it more often and back up their disk images! It's probably cheaper than paying the VPS for it.
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¹ not sponsored, but I've done work for their YouTube channel years ago@vkc I have a DreamHost shared web hosting account with at least a couple dozen services on it.
I have a janky process running on my home server that (3 times per week) SSHes into each of my DreamHost projects and incrementally backs up files and a MySQL dump stream to an append-only Restic socket back at home. The thing being backed up can't destroy the backups.
Needs cleanup, but it works for me.
If you don't have off-site backup of your cloud, you're not backed up.
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Linode¹ makes dd-ing from a VPS to home reasonably simple with a rescue boot environment option included.
Boot into that, set a temporary root password (just for the session), then from home: ssh "dd if=/dev/sdX " | dd of=image.img status=progress
Guessing most other VPS' have similar tools, folks should avail themselves of it more often and back up their disk images! It's probably cheaper than paying the VPS for it.
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¹ not sponsored, but I've done work for their YouTube channel years ago@vkc That's really cool! I am on week 21 of a 1 week project to migrate from my old VPS to a new server, and it still doesn't work
Maybe this would be better...
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Current status: backing up the disk from the VPS to my backup server using dd.
Half of the downtime is just me sitting, waiting for bits to move from one cursed thing to another.
@vkc any chance you'll create a video about this? I'd love your guidance and insight on the process.
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@vkc any chance you'll create a video about this? I'd love your guidance and insight on the process.
@educoder probably not? It's one of those things where a dedicated video would be too short or specific to justify. Blog post would be more likely, or mentioning this as part of a larger video!
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@educoder probably not? It's one of those things where a dedicated video would be too short or specific to justify. Blog post would be more likely, or mentioning this as part of a larger video!
@vkc ooh, a written reference would be great! I'm still relatively new to managing my VPS. Really appreciate everything you publish.
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@amenonsen in addition!
As a sysadmin, I usually recommend taking periodic full-disk image backups.
Files are great and useful but don't always capture the whole picture of how a system is (mis)configured. I can't tell you how many times I was saved by full-disk backups. Being able to spin up a backup and examine the state can save a lot of time getting things online after an issue.
Great advice! I have only been doing file-level backups, but will start doing this as well. Thanks!
CC: @amenonsen@mastodon.social
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Linode¹ makes dd-ing from a VPS to home reasonably simple with a rescue boot environment option included.
Boot into that, set a temporary root password (just for the session), then from home: ssh "dd if=/dev/sdX " | dd of=image.img status=progress
Guessing most other VPS' have similar tools, folks should avail themselves of it more often and back up their disk images! It's probably cheaper than paying the VPS for it.
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¹ not sponsored, but I've done work for their YouTube channel years agoStill not back online.
I'm running into issues related to PeerTube's replacing of yarn with pnpm.
I'm going through the release notes again! Ugh
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Still not back online.
I'm running into issues related to PeerTube's replacing of yarn with pnpm.
I'm going through the release notes again! Ugh
@vkc Good luck!
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Still not back online.
I'm running into issues related to PeerTube's replacing of yarn with pnpm.
I'm going through the release notes again! Ugh
Progress! I did miss a step involving some sort of pnpm configuration, redoing it now! JavaScript is strange sometimes.
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Current status: backing up the disk from the VPS to my backup server using dd.
Half of the downtime is just me sitting, waiting for bits to move from one cursed thing to another.
@vkc Same thing with rclone. Enjoy the quiet LOL!
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Progress! I did miss a step involving some sort of pnpm configuration, redoing it now! JavaScript is strange sometimes.
OK! I think we're back online! Now the PeerTube is running Debian Trixie and has been upgraded to the most recent version from upstream!
