System Overview

There are some special aspects in this setup:

• Several cronjobs are set up to sync the mergerfs array's parity using SnapRaid and to scrub the ZFS pool on a regular basis.
• Because I want to access several services from the internet (Grafana, Photoprism, Jellyseerr), a cronjob updates the Cloudflare DNS record with the external IP every 30 minutes.

Maintenance

Updating

The repository is configured to update all docker compose stacks using Renovate on a regular basis. After Renovate's pull-requests have been merged, you can simply pull in the changes on your server using git pull and update either all stacks using ./update.sh --all or a specific stack by executing ./update.sh [stack_name].

This script also cleans up old and unused images after restarting the stacks to make sure no disk space is wasted.

Backing up

For runtime application data, the stacks use Docker volumes. There is a helper script called backup-volumes.sh which helps you integrate a proper and safe way to back up all docker volumes. If you want to set it up yourself, make sure you properly edit the included volumes on line 2 (included_volumes).

The script can be called with 2 arguments, mount and unmount:

• mount will read-only mount all included volumes to /mnt/docker-volume-backups/[VOLUME] and pause all containers using said volume.
• unmount reverses the above process by unmounting the volume, removing the mount point and resuming the paused containers.

So before triggering the actual backup using the backup tool of your choice, you have to call the script with mount, after the backup is done you should call unmount. Personally, i'm using Borgmatic using its before_everything and after_everything hooks.