Clone your Yunohost server - What is best practice?

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I have a perfect Yunohost server running that my family are becoming more and more dependant on as we all move away from USA based providers to self-hosted, EU based services . As an amateur and the only pseudo-techie looking after it I am starting to feel the need for some insurance. To that end I have bought a direct hardware copy of the little Dell server I am using for self-hosting. Now all I need to do is to clone the original. I have trawled through here and like many I first considered using Clonezilla but based on feedback here the best practice seems to be :- 1.a fresh install of Yunohost followed by 2. a system restore from a backup then 3. restore all apps from backups. Is that the best practice? What method have you used? what is the simplest approach (for a Linux newbie)? All comments welcomed!

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If you had not mentioned it, that would have been my suggestion :wink:

One of the benefits is that it is very flexible: I used it to migrate from Orange Pi Zero (32 bit ARM) to a more powerful 64 bit AMD system. The only thing to take care of, is that the target system can run Debian and that the storage is large enough for all apps and data you want to restore there.

There’s one thing to take into account though: backups for data-hungry apps such as Nextcloud default to a ‘core only’ backup, in which the app itself is backed up, but not the user data.
The reason for that is that the backups most often are used in case of a failed upgrade, where the user data is not touched but it would blow up the resulting backups.

With your family relying on your server, you like it to be reliably available, but the users will especially appreciate their data being safe. You could consider running the second box as a backup target:

  • install Yunohost + one of the backup frameworks on the extra server
  • install the backup client on your main server
  • have the backup cilent send the regular Yunohost-backup files to the backup server,
  • have the backup client send user data to the backup server (which directories that includes, depends on the apps you have installed)

In case of disaster you can either restore the Yunohost-backupfiles to the backup server, and have it run there, or, depending on the damage, reinstall Yunohost on the main server and then restore the Yunohost-backups and user data there. In case you like to test it, the restore is instead of `yunohost postinstall.

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Thanks for the feedback, much appreciated. You raise some interesting points. I wasn’t aware of the data from NC or Immich not being in the backup but if I think about it that should have been obvious to me. you suggest running regular backup files from the main server to my “hot standby” , what would you use for that? Something built in to YNH or an alternative app?