this post was submitted on 18 Nov 2023
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Using Gitea (selfhosted) to do daily backups of other selfhosted servers. (alien.top)
submitted 11 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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Hi All

I have a selfhosted Gitea server, and I use it for a lot more than coding. I even do management of document history for my business. I love it.

What I would like to do, is use it backup specific folders on other servers in my homelab.

Say for example my webdev test server: I would like to daily back up /etc/ /var/www/one.example.com/ /var/www/two.example.com/ etc etc

Now my knowledge on Gitea, and Git as a whole, is relatively limited to clone, add, commit, push and pull.

If I setup a user for the server, then insert the ssh pub key. I would like to know, how from the terminal (via SSH to the server), I can create a new repo for folder /var/www/one.example.com/ and then do an initial commit, so that the .git folder is created locally in /var/www/one.example.com/.git/

Then I can set a cronjob to do my daily backups, but still have the magic of full file history.

Also, can you configure a Repo to only keep changes back for say 90 days? (Space saving in the long run).

I know there are a lot of ways to do this, but I have a very good reason for using Git, mainly, it streamlines restoring files at any point in history, and also if I need to fork a website I am developing, I can do it in Git with ease.

Plus it allows me to add other users to a repo for example, and allows us to do branches etc.

Currently I am backing everything up using a script I wrote, and I have a dedicated bare metal that is handling that. I get a .tar.gz for the last 7 days, the last 5 sundays and the last 3 months (1st). But this is starting to take up a lot of harddrive space.

Any advice would kindly be appreciated.

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 11 months ago

Hope you are not doing that for binary files. It can become huge really fast. This is also not a good option for text files that change it's structure or content all the time. It's better to use backup solutions for backups, and version control systems for it's purpose.