The fanbase is still large, but the Lemmy community hasn’t quite caught up yet, and now there is a transitional period where the audience is smaller.

  • Bilbo Baggins@hobbit.worldEnglish
    5·
    1 year ago

    This is a concern, but luckily this isn’t required. I set up hobbit.world to host my Tolkien related communities. It only costs $6 a month plus the $35/yr for the domain name to host a tiny instance like this. I don’t need to depend on anyone but my hosting provider.

    To be safe I should download backups once a month or so.

    But the point is that for big communities that people put a lot of time into, there should be an instance for each one owned by one of the mods.

    Edit: Meant to reply to the person concerned about the centralization of communities.

    • Dave@lemmy.nzEnglish
      4·
      1 year ago

      To be safe I should download backups once a month or so.

      Please do it more often if you have users other than yourself. One backup on the same server is barely a backup at all.

        • Dave@lemmy.nzEnglish
          1·
          1 year ago

          Even just a cronjob or scheduled task to download the backups to a machine at another location would be a big improvement. Then you can do it far more often because it’s automated.

          But personally I like to have both a copy on a PC and a cloud backup, in addition to the server.

          • Bilbo Baggins@hobbit.worldEnglish
            1·
            1 year ago

            I’m using the easy Lemmy script to run the docker instance. How do I take a backup of a running docker instance.

            The backups I’ve done so far are full shard backups. But I don’t have a way to automate that.

            • Dave@lemmy.nzEnglish
              2·
              1 year ago

              The page here explains getting a database dump on a running instance (and how to restore): https://join-lemmy.org/docs/administration/backup_and_restore.html

              Then just back up the other files in the volumes directory where Lemmy is installed (everything except postgres, which is what the database dump does).

              The pictrs volume includes both the uploaded images and the image cache. I have no idea how to separate out the uploaded images so you don’t have to back up the cache, I just back it all up.

            • Die4Ever@programming.devEnglish
              1·
              1 year ago

              this is the bash script I use to create backups

              #! /bin/bash
# https://join-lemmy.org/docs/administration/backup_and_restore.html#a-sample-backup-script
now=$(date +"%Y-%m-%d_%H.%M.%S")

cd ~/lemmy && (docker-compose exec -T postgres pg_dumpall -c -U lemmy 1> dump.sql 2> dump.errors)
cd ~/lemmy && zip -r9 ~/bak-lemmy-$now.zip ./ --exclude "volumes/postgres/*"
rm -f ~/lemmy/dump.sql

              it creates very small zip files as a result so it’s very efficient

              I made a cron for it to run every 3 hours, like

              0 */3 * * * ~/lemmy/backup.sh