A tool to create & restore complete, self-contained backups of Docker containers
Docker services usually have a bunch of volatile data volumes that need to be backed up. Backing up an entire (file)system is easy, but often enough you just want to create a backup of a single (or a few) containers, maybe to restore them on another system later.
Some services, such as databases, also need to be aware (flushed/synced/paused) of an impending backup. The backup should be run on the Docker host, as you don't want to have a backup client configured & running in every single container either, since this would add a lot of maintenance & administration overhead.
docker-backup
directly connects to Docker, analyzes a container's mounts &
volumes, and generates a list of dirs & files that need to be backed up on the
host system. This also collects all the metadata information associated with a
container, so it can be restored or cloned on a different host, including its
port-mappings and data volumes.
The generated list can either be fed to an existing backup solution or
docker-backup
can directly create a .tar
image of your container, so you can
simply copy it to another machine.
docker-backup
requires Go 1.11 or higher. Make sure you have a working Go
environment. See the install instructions.
docker-backup
works with Docker hosts running Docker 18.02 (API version 1.36)
and newer.
- Arch Linux: docker-backup
git clone https://github.com/muesli/docker-backup.git
cd docker-backup
go build
Run docker-backup --help
to see a full list of options.
To backup a single container start docker-backup
with the backup
command and
supply the ID of the container:
docker-backup backup <container ID>
This will create a .json
file with the container's metadata, as well as a file
containing all the volumes that need to be backed up with an external tool like
restic or borgbackup.
If you want to directly create a .tar
file containing all the container's
data, simply run:
docker-backup backup --tar <container ID>
You can also backup all running containers on the host with the --all
flag:
docker-backup backup --all
To backup all containers (regardless of their current running state), run:
docker-backup backup --all --stopped
With the help of --launch
you can directly launch a backup program with the
generated file-list supplied as an argument:
docker-backup backup --all --launch "restic -r /dest backup --password-file pwfile --tag %tag --files-from %list"
To restore a container, run docker-backup
with the restore
command:
docker-backup restore <backup file>
docker-backup
will automatically detect whether you supplied a .tar
or
.json
file and restore the container, including all its port-mappings and data
volumes.
If you want to start the container once the restore has finished, add the
--start
flag:
docker-backup restore --start <backup file>