How to Restore DigitalOcean Environment⚓︎

Summary⚓︎

This article falls under the category of Disaster Recovery. It will serve as a step-by-step guide for restoring my entire DigitalOcean environment in the event of a disaster.

Considerations⚓︎

There are currently a number of safeguards in place to make sure that my DigitalOcean environment can be restored, which are listed below:

Snapshots⚓︎

• The quickest and most basic method of restoration. Automatic snapshots are created daily at 2am.
• Contingent on retaining access to DigitalOcean account.

File Backups⚓︎

• Rclone and cron are used extensively on the do-docker droplet to backup the following to Backblaze B2:

# Unifi Backup
0 1 * * * rclone sync /home/unifiadmin/.config/appdata/unificontroller/data/backup/autobackup b2:ImageBackup/Unifi --verbose --log-file=/home/unifiadmin/logs/unifi_b2.log && curl -fsS --retry 3 -o /dev/null https://hc-ping.com/a0d8acd9-bc47-498c-a184-7464eb362793

# Ghost Backup
30 1 * * 1 rclone copy /opt/ghost_content b2:DigitalOcean-DB-Backup/ghost && curl -fsS -m 10 --retry 5 -o /dev/null https://hc-ping.com/a7c0cf6e-7c33-4e59-9b5f-6fae1f6c32b7

# Wallabag Backup
0 1 * * 1 rclone copy /opt/wallabag b2:DigitalOcean-DB-Backup/Docker/Volumes/wallabag && curl -fsS -m 10 --retry 5 -o /dev/null https://hc-ping.com/6bae6a26-7b11-4e63-baab-7cf14e341f15

# Monica Backup
0 2 * * 1 rclone copy /opt/monica b2:DigitalOcean-DB-Backup/Docker/Volumes/monica && curl -fsS -m 10 --retry 5 -o /dev/null https://hc-ping.com/cf11ef1f-4289-4cf8-8d25-41be5fe936c6

Databases⚓︎

DigitalOcean Managed Database

• Automatic point in time backups managed by DigitalOcean.
• Additional daily backup of Bookstack database done by Snapshooter.io and sent to B2.

Git⚓︎

The following configurations are regularly backed up to GitHub:

• Docker-Compose.yml
• Monica .env file
• Nginx configurations

Disaster Recovery⚓︎

The following instructions can be used as a guide in order to restore an entire environment:

• Create a new droplet from scratch using Ubuntu.

• Install rclone and configure B2 as an endpoint.
• Install Docker
• Copy the Docker-Compose.yml file to ~/.docker/compose and run docker-compose up -d.

• Use rclone to restore Unifi, Ghost, Monica & Wallabag using the following syntax:

# Unifi Restore
rclone copy b2:ImageBackup/Unifi /home/unifiadmin/.config/appdata/unificontroller/data/backup/autobackup

# Ghost Restore
rclone copy b2:DigitalOcean-DB-Backup/ghost /opt/ghost_content

# Wallabag Restore
rclone copy b2:DigitalOcean-DB-Backup/Docker/Volumes/wallabag /opt/wallabag

# Monica Restore
rclone copy b2:DigitalOcean-DB-Backup/Docker/Volumes/monica /opt/monica

• Additionally, restore Heimdall to the /home/unifiadmin/.config/appdata/heimdall folder with rclone.
• rclone copy b2:DigitalOcean-DB-Backup/Docker/Appdata/heimdall /home/unifiadmin/.config/appdata/
• Install Nginx with sudo apt install nginx -y.
• Restore Nginx configurations to /etc/nginx/sites-available and /etc/nginx.
• Create any symlinks as necessary

sudo ln -s /etc/nginx/sites-available/<service>.conf /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/<service>.conf

• Reload Nginx as necessary with sudo service nginx restart.
• Install Searx
• Consider the database to be fully operational, but should it need to be restored from a backup, reference the backup and restore a MySQL database article.
• Migrate an existing MySQL database with the following command:

mysql -u doadmin -pshow-password -h db-mysql-nyc1-79999-do-user-6634872-0.a.db.ondigitalocean.com -P 25060 < <local-sql-dump-path>

• Update Cloudflare DNS records with a new public IP if necessary.
• Verify connectivity of all services to ensure everything came back as it should with all data intact.