I need to *keep* several different *manual* snapshots of my linode, not just one. What would be the cheapest workaround?

This was not obvious to me:

The Backup service can store a single manual snapshot. Taking a new >snapshot overwrites any previously saved snapshot.

Although now it is kind of obvious because you can't give away an infinite amount of backup storage for unlimited snapshots :)

But I really want to keep several different snapshots as my system evolves, and eventually build a new linode from one of these saved snapshots. What would be the cheapest way of accomplishing this?

Thanks!

3 Replies

Use block storage and a solution like borg or restic.

For my Linode (using borg), I keep

  • 48 hourly backups (taken every 4 hours);
  • 30 daily backups;
  • 12 weekly backups; and
  • 12 monthly backups.

I have 75Gb of block storage costing $7.50/month. IMHO, the above pretty much qualifies as "unlimited" ;-) With less block storage and shorter retention times, the cost will go down.

Each backup is mountable as a file system so recovery is pretty easy once the Linode is running.

Both borg and restic can back up to object storage as well (for even lower cost…but harder access).

Linode keeps triple-redundant backups of block storage volumes too.

-- sw

Thanks for trying to help. It sounds a bit complicated tho. For example, how do I copy a single snapshot taken through the linode control panel (backup section) to somewhere and then how do I bring it back to linode control panel if later I want to?

You can’t… The only backups you can manage through the Linode control panel are the ones that Linode gives you as part of the backup plan.

I’d file a support ticket about this and see if you can more “plan” backups.

— sw

P.S. You could take what I described above and develop an infrastructure around it using the Linode API that simulates what the control panel does when restoring a backup. However, to be truly effective, that infrastructure needs to run on some machine that is not the Linode to be restored…a home PC (with a good, reliable internet connection) or another Linode.

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