Solel//dev docs
For admins

Back up to another drive

Snapshots live on the same disk as everything else. A backup puts a copy on another one: a second drive, or a USB stick you keep plugged in. Backups are part of Settings › Backups and snapshots, so only admins and the owner see them.

A backup holds what a snapshot holds: accounts, settings, routes, devices and activity. Files, photos and what apps save aren't in it.

Set it up

  1. Plug the drive into your server. Drives formatted for Windows or a Mac usually work as they are. Solel looks for disks the server mounts under /media and /mnt; choose Look again if yours isn't listed yet.
  2. Open Settings › Backups and snapshots, and choose Use this disk next to it. The disk your server already runs on shows up but can't be chosen, and says why. The first backup runs straight away.
  3. Choose how often. Daily or weekly, at 1 am unless you change it, keeping the last 14. You can keep 7, 14, 30 or 60.

Times are in the server's own time zone. A backup missed while the server was off runs once it's back. Back up now runs one by hand. Stop, under Backing up to, stops backing up but leaves the backups on the drive.

If the page says "Backups aren't on for this server", set SOLEL_BACKUP_ROOTS to where your disks are mounted, restart Solel, then choose Check again.

A drive formatted on Linux

Solel doesn't run as root, so it has to be let in first. Settings shows the exact line to run on the server. 65532 is the user Solel runs as. For a drive mounted at /media/usb, it looks like this:

sudo mkdir -p '/media/usb/solel-backups' && sudo chown 65532 '/media/usb/solel-backups'

Then choose Use this disk again.

Every backup is checked

After each run, Solel reads the backup back from the drive, checks every piece against its fingerprint, then opens a copy to be sure it would really restore. A backup that fails that test counts as a failed one, and Health tells you. Recent backups shows each run as Tested or Failed, with why.

Each backup stores only what changed since the others. Older ones go first, and sooner if the drive fills up.

Getting it back

Under Backups on the disk, choose Restore… next to the one you want. Restoring asks for your password, takes a snapshot of how things are now, then puts the backup back and restarts.

After a reinstall, setup looks at every drive for backups and offers to pick your server up where it left off. Choose Pick it back up, and everyone signs in as they did before. Files and photos come back too if they're still on the server's disk.