Backup including Apps

Apps and Virtualization
1

Hi,

I wand to be able to backup my configuration and that shall include the installed apps.
Then, I want to move my drives that contain the data for the apps (i.e. the application data, not the containers/apps) to a new machine.
There, I want to

  • attach the drives/pool containing the application data
  • load the backup

And all the apps shall be back online

Is that possible, or are the apps not part of the backup?

Best regards,
Hendrik

2

Start with a detailed listing of your current hardware, os, apps, pool setup, etc. Post what you want to move to a new machine and/or reuse from your old machine.

I could be as easy as installing TrueNAS on new machine, physically moving data and app drives and pools to the new machine and then restoring the System Configuration file.

Better details means getting better advice and feedback.

3

Hi,

thanks for your reply.
Actually, I had started on an VM and configured the main System and NPM and HA. Then, I wanted to move to my actual hardware.
The purpose of this was to understand what is being backed up and what not.

I was expecting that the Apps would be backed up.

OS is the current 25.10 beta.
Pool Setup:

  • one zRaid1 for Data (not related to the Apps)
  • one single for Apps (it was called SSD)

I moved the Backup from the VM to the physical machine, and all was restored except the APPs. When I went to the APPs site of the UI, I was asked to choose a pool.

I now suspect, that I would have needed to replicate the pool that is the Apps-Pool from the VM to the new Hardware first, before restoring the backup?

I see on the new hardware that this is missing:

image
image2417×1270 258 KB

And in fact when going to the APPs Tab, it was asking me to select the pool and “SSD” was pre-selected.

Greetings,
Hendrik

4

Hello,

can anyone help me, on backing up/restoring the apps?

Thanks and best regards,
Hendrik

5

You might be better off recreating the app on the new bare metal setup and pointing it to the data you migrated.

There weren’t details of the physical server, VM software and how you had everything configured to begin with. We didn’t know how you had the apps configured for the data sharing, either.

6

For that reason I am using Jailmaker to run a single jail running docker. That jail uses a dataset that contains all configurations for docker compose. When the dataset is copied to a new machine it is easy to start the jail there which in turns brings up all apps.

7

Hello,

There weren’t details of the physical server, VM software and how you had everything configured to begin with. We didn’t know how you had the apps configured for the data sharing, either.

My apologies. It is more that I am looking for the best way to set it up. It is not so much the question how it is currently configured, but how it should be configured.

Now, I have three Apps. But I want to be prepared for desaster recovery. And thus my concept was to set everything up in a VM and then to move to the physical server - to test the concept.
And it was a good choice, because it revealed to me, that the way I did it, Apps are not backed up.

So, my question is:
How do I make a backup that includes the Apps.

I understand that Apps need:

  1. the information that is entered by me when configuring an App
  2. [the docker image] - but that can be pulled from the web
  3. the user-data (which is mounted into a container and it is obvious to me that this needs to be backed up by me)

I was somewhat expecting, that (1) is part of the normal “db” backup of truenas, but apparently (?) it is not.

I hope I am expressing my self better now.

@florihupf Yes, I was also thinking to just store my docker-compose files somewhere and skip apps. To be honest, I am not sure what benefits Apps bring compared to plain docker-compose…

Greetings,
Hendrik

8

IMHO, nothing than have a (poor) GUI.
Instead using eg. Portainer you have a lot more control over your apps, manual one click config backup or easy API to export info automatically, access to networks configuration, …
Regarding user data, you can rely on snapshots of your host path; just take care about stateful app that can need to be stopped to ensure file integrity (like database)

9

Hello,

I thought, I could just replicate the .ix-apps myself, but /mnt/.ix-apps cannot be selected as replication task.

Is there any way to backup Apps? I mean: I really feel stupid to ask, but it seems I am the only one with this issue. Or are others happy to just take screenshots?

Greetings,
Hendrik

10

I was using jailmaker too, until i updated to 25.10 and couldn’t get the jail working with gpu passthrough. I then migrated everything to a debian lxc