I Lost All My Data on a VPS — Here's What Actually Saved Me

There’s a post on r/selfhosted that’s been living in my head rent-free. Title: “Well, today I lost all my data.” The OP wasn’t running some janky Raspberry Pi in a closet. They had a Hetzner CX22, Docker Compose, and a decade of family photos in a bind mount. One docker volume prune later — gone. No snapshots. No offsite copy. Just a support ticket to Hetzner that came back with “we can’t help.”

I’ve been there. Not with photos, but with a Nextcloud instance I’d spent a weekend tuning. The sick feeling when ls returns nothing is something you don’t forget.

So let’s talk about what actually works, because the thread had some genuinely good advice buried under 200 comments of “should’ve used ZFS.”

The Three Camps #

The community splits into three approaches, and they’re not mutually exclusive. But most people pick one and call it a day. That’s the mistake.

Camp 1: The Snapshot Purist #

Btrfs or ZFS snapshots, sent to a second disk or a remote host via zfs send. This is the gold standard for recovery speed. Rolling back a bad update takes seconds, not hours.

The gotcha? Snapshots are not backups. If your house burns down, or your Hetzner box gets wiped by a rogue script, your snapshots die with it. I’ve seen people run ZFS on a single VPS and call it “backed up.” It isn’t.

Camp 2: The Offsite Minimalist #

restic or borgbackup to a Backblaze B2 bucket or a cheap storage VPS. This is what I actually run now. Restic 0.16.0 handles deduplication and encryption out of the box, and the forget --prune policy keeps my bucket at about 12 GB for a 40 GB dataset. Costs me $0.60 a month on B2.

Setup time: about 20 minutes if you’ve never touched it. The killer feature is that it’s offsite. A docker volume prune on the host doesn’t touch my B2 bucket.

The downside? Restore speed. Pulling 40 GB back from B2 takes a while. And if you’re on a metered connection, that’s a bill you’ll feel.

Camp 3: The Managed Cop-Out #

Some people in the thread argued for just using a managed service — Hetzner Storage Box, rsync.net, or even a second VPS with syncthing. This is fine for files, but it falls apart for databases. You can’t just rsync a live Postgres data directory and expect a clean restore. You need pg_dump or pg_basebackup on a schedule.

The Real Killer: Docker Volumes #

Here’s the thing nobody says out loud. Docker makes backups harder, not easier. Named volumes are opaque. You can’t just tar them while the container is running and expect consistency. I’ve lost count of how many people in that thread admitted their “backup” was a docker cp of a running container’s filesystem.

If you’re on Docker, use bind mounts to a known directory like /opt/containers. Then at least restic can see the raw files. For databases, run a pre-backup hook that dumps to a mounted directory. It’s ugly, but it works.

What I’d Actually Do Tomorrow #

If I were starting from zero, with a $5 Hetzner CX22 and a handful of containers:

1. Bind mounts everywhere. No named volumes. Ever.
2. A daily cron job that runs pg_dump for Postgres and restic backup for everything else, targeting B2.
3. A weekly restic check to verify the repo isn’t corrupt. This is the step everyone skips, and it’s the one that bites you.
4. A second, manual backup of the most critical stuff — like your .env files and compose YAML — to a private GitHub repo. That’s not a backup, but it’s a lifesaver when you need to rebuild fast.

The thread’s OP could have recovered everything with about 30 minutes of setup. Instead, they’re rebuilding from scratch.

The Honest Truth #

I haven’t tested this on ARM, and the community is genuinely split on whether restic or borg is better for large repos. Your mileage may vary. But the core principle isn’t up for debate: if your backup lives on the same machine as your data, you don’t have a backup.

You have a second copy of the same problem.

FAQ #

Is a snapshot on the same VPS enough? #

No. It protects against accidental deletion and bad updates, but not hardware failure or provider-level issues. You need something offsite.

How much does offsite backup actually cost? #

For a personal setup, expect $1–$3 a month. Backblaze B2 charges $6/TB/month for storage, and egress is free if you use their CDN. Hetzner Storage Box is a flat €3.80/month for 1 TB.

Can I back up a running Docker container? #

You can, but you shouldn’t. Use bind mounts and dump databases before backing up. A docker cp of a live container is a coin flip for consistency.