It’s fairly obvious why stopping a service while backing it up makes sense. Imagine backing up Immich while it’s running. You start the backup, db is backed up, now image assets are being copied. That could take an hour. While the assets are being backed up, a new image is uploaded. The live database knows about it but the one you’ve backed up doesn’t. Then your backup process reaches the new image asset and it copies it. If you restore this backup, Immich will contain an asset that isn’t known by the database. In order to avoid scenarios like this, you’d stop Immich while the backup is running.

Now consider a system that can do instant snapshots like ZFS or LVM. Immich is running, you stop it, take a snapshot, then restart it. Then you backup Immich from the snapshot while Immich is running. This should reduce the downtime needed to the time it takes to do the snapshot. The state of Immich data in the snapshot should be equivalent to backing up a stopped Immich instance.

Now consider a case like above without stopping Immich while taking the snapshot. In theory the data you’re backing up should represent the complete state of Immich at a point in time eliminating the possibility of divergent data between databases and assets. It would however represent the state of a live Immich instance. E.g. lock files, etc. Wouldn’t restoring from such a backup be equivalent to kill -9 or pulling the cable and restarting the service? If a service can recover from a cable pull, is it reasonable to consider it should recover from restoring from a snapshot taken while live? If so, is there much point to stopping services during snapshots?

  • @Evotech@lemmy.worldEnglish
    2•4 months ago

    Modern image snapshot backups stop the service for av instant, creates a local snapshot to backup while the service runs a Delta then you apply the Delta to the running image

    • Avid AmoebaOPEnglish
      1•4 months ago

      When you say stopping the service for an instant you must mean pausing its execution or at least its IO. Actually stopping the service can’t be guaranteed to take an instant. It can’t be guaranteed to start in an instant. Worst of all, it can’t even be guaranteed that it’ll be able to start again. When I say stopping I mean sysemctl stop or docker stop or pkill etc. In other words delivering an orderly, graceful kill signal and waiting for the process/es to stop execution.