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  • 17 comments
Joined 6 months ago
Cake day: April 25th, 2026
  • Not a server, but a storage box from Hetzner I use for my most important off-site backup. At home I have a small Dell Optiplex that runs Jellyfin and is exposed outwards via Tailscale. It does consume a lot of electricity, was cheap, great performance. I don’t know what is holding you back from self-hosting, but it does not need a lot of effort.

  • I actually use the document_exporter of paperless-ngx. I have a small bash script backup-paperless.sh that runs the paperless-ngx document_exporter and also makes a database dump using pg_dump. It sets up the restic backups logic with daily, weekly and monthly backups. I run that bash script using a systemd service paperless-backup.service. This service is run daily with the timer paperless-backup.timer, randomly at 3 am ±30 minutes. restic is smart, so it does only backup if there are changes. The incremental backups are great, in case the database corrupts without me noticing. I’ll share the scripts in case you are interested in how it works:

    backup-paperless.sh

    #!/bin/bash
    set -euo pipefail
    
    COMPOSE_DIR="/home/user/paperless-ngx/"
    DUMP_DIR="$COMPOSE_DIR/sqldump"
    EXPORT_DIR="/usr/src/paperless/export"
    
    export RESTIC_REPOSITORY="sftp:abc123@abc123.your-storagebox.de:/backup/restic"
    export RESTIC_PASSWORD_FILE="/home/user/.config/restic/password"
    
    mkdir -p "$DUMP_DIR"
    
    cd "$COMPOSE_DIR"
    docker compose exec -T webserver document_exporter "$EXPORT_DIR" -p
    docker compose exec -T db pg_dump -U paperless paperless > "$DUMP_DIR/dump.sql"
    
    
    
    restic backup "$DUMP_DIR" "$COMPOSE_DIR/export"
    
    restic forget \
    	--keep-daily 7 \
    	--keep-weekly 4 \
    	--keep-monthly 6 \
    	--prune
    
    rm -rf "$COMPOSE_DIR/export"/*
    rm -rf "$DUMP_DIR"/*
    

    paperless-backup.service

    [Unit]
    Description=Paperless-ngx Restic Backup
    Wants=network-online.target
    After=network-online.target docker.service
    
    [Service]
    Type=oneshot
    User=user
    WorkingDirectory=/home/user/paperless-ngx
    ExecStart=/home/user/paperless-ngx/backup-paperless.sh
    

    paperless-backup.timer

    [Unit]
    Description=Run paperless backup every 24 hours
    
    [Timer]
    OnCalendar=*-*-* 03:00:00
    Persistent=true
    RandomizedDelaySec=30min
    
    [Install]
    WantedBy=timers.target