Safety of backups with self-hosting

This weekend, I updated and upgraded my self-hosted deployments, played around with server storage and attached a fresh block storage volume to it. I also fixed some problems with ephemeral storage in some of my one-click deployment kind of self-hosted services.

All this was easy because of the safety net of backups that I had set up earlier, after suffering from a few self-hosted deployment downtimes.

I have been taking remote backups to Backblaze B2 for the last 5 months using restic. Most importantly, I have a working backup restoration workflow that’s tested well for times when things do go wrong.

Knowing that I can recover from any mess-up I might potentially make gives me the confidence to perform some arguably destructive operations without a little more confidence.