Unifi Controller Docker backup

Currently running my Unifi Controller as a docker container which works great. If you ever ended up with a broken Unifi Controller or Cloud Key you know the hassle it is to re-adopt and re-provision all your network gear to get back to square one. You should really keep track of the automatic backups from Unifi.

I’m using ryansch/unifi-rpi container which has more then 10 million pulls on docker hub. There isn’t any information about handeling backups in the description which surprises me! It is however a pretty easy thing to setup properly. Since I’m running my Unifi Controller in docker on a Raspberry Pi Docker Swarm my biggest fear is to fry the SD card. If I fry the SD card on the docker node it will also fry the automatic backups the unifi controller writes to disk.

If we look at the docker container we have a folder for the automatic backups /backup/autobackup. I have several NFS shares bound to y docker nodes via autofs that are located on my NAS which should be a much safer place for these backups.

Locate the backup dir

If we look at the source for this container on GitHub, we find that the working dir is /var/lib/unifi. If we then execute docker exec {containerID} ls we find a backup directory containing an autobackup folder. So that should mean that we have the backups at /var/lib/unifi/backup/autobackup. So we edit the service in docker, adding a volume binding against a node folder. In my case, I use /mnt/nfs/backups/docker_unifi which is mounted from my NAS on the docker node.

Then we can set the auto backup occurrence to every hour and schedule it in the next 5 minutes. We see that unifi puts out an autobackup file and metadata in JSON format on disk. This means we have a safe backup on our NAS. We can now schedule it to something more realistic like once every week or day depending on how much you change your setup.