Use federation as backup or mirror?

🏷️ General
1

I wonder if federation can be used to create kind of a mirror-server? My idea is to share all folders from one server to another. Will the data remain on the second server if the 1st server breaks? Can this second server take over or used for restoring data?

2

The Data is only linked, no files are transfered when sharing, federation or otherwise, so this is not a solution for your usecase i´m afraid.

I would suggest a ‘normal’ Backup solution, there are tons of possibilities on this front.

1 Like
3

OK

Thanks. I should have understodd that the actual files recided at the original server.

R

Den torsdag 9 januari 2020 13:32:27 CET, Gerald Buttinger via Nextcloud community noreply@nextcloud.com skrev:

Ascendancer

    January 9

The Data is only linked, no files are transfered when sharing, federation or otherwise, so this is not a solution for your usecase i´m afraid.

I would suggest a ‘normal’ Backup solution, there are tons of possibilities on this front.

4

@rollanders please mind marking the topic as solved then. Glad i could help.

5

@rollanders here is the feature request for mirroring federated storage locally. Feel free to give it a thumbs up or increase the bounty amount.

6

You could in theory rig up an rsync process in the background to sync up the data between two servers. Not sure how effective/efficient it would be.

After copying the data you would have to have NextCloud “rescan” the folder with changes. This could introduce delays.

7

Rclone is built to do exactly this, plus includes built-in support for Nextcloud and can save to multiple locations.

8

I now use rclone to do the backup to an external place. I have not tried yet to do a restore. Hope it will never happen🥴

1 Like
9

Congratulations on creating a backup! Good news is there is a lot of documentation on this, plus an rclone community forum. Other have discussed rclone backups on this forum as well.

Other discussions about this mention scripting bash backup and restore – see this active thread.

A simple tool you could use alongside rclone is restic, which is explained in detail by @Reiner_Nippes. Seems it will help you add scheduling, pruning, and encryption to your rclone backups. Looks useful!