Would you delete your web server and restore it from backup?

How much do you trust your backups? Yesterday, I put that to the test with Nassella: I deleted all of the data for the Nassella instance that hosts this blog and the Nassella Wordpress site.

After confirming all of the sites were completely offline and not responding, I proceeded to restore the latest automatic snapshot that Nassella had created, via the Nassella web interface. A few minutes later a new VPS instance had been setup with all of the same configuration as before, including DNS and app configuration, as well as all of the application data. Everything was back online!

Even though I've tested the backups and restores many times before, it was still a bit nerve-racking! But I believe backups are only as good as your testing of them. I still wouldn't choose to intentionally do that if I didn't feel it was important, but I do have a lot of confidence in the Nassella backup system; way more than any system I ever had before.

In the past, I always had backups of my self-hosted instances, but I never went out of my way to test them. Not only was restoring from backup not a fully automated process like it is with Nassella, but I was also always nervous about breaking the configuration in some unexpected way. I feel so much more confident with Nassella because I know the config is read-only to begin with so it can't get messed up and that also means the actual writable data is completely separated and I know 100% of it is fully backed up because of that.

I'm eager to migrate my NextCloud self-hosted instance to Nassella now. Not only will I be more confident in the backups but it is also a lot more work to upgrade NextCloud instances on my previous self-hosting setup, so it will be nice to always have an up-to-date NextCloud install.

The other big one I really want to move to Nassella is my Gitea setup for code.thintz.com. I use that for hosting the source for Nassella currently, along with many other projects. But I also use it for other things like storing an encrypted password repository that I use across all my devices on a daily basis. Hopefully soon Gitea support can be added to Nassella!

How much do you trust your backups? Regardless of whether or not you use Nassella, this is just a friendly reminder to go test them!