On Apr 16, 2019, at 5:58 AM, Petar Kozić via FreeIPA-users <freeipa-users@lists.fedorahosted.org> wrote:

Hi folks.
I’m using freeipa in docker on one VM machine and for now, I satisfied how that works, but I worried about backup.
Can someone tell me what is best practice for backup ipa which works in docker?

One upside of Docker is a very clear picture of what will be saved across reboots. If the container reboots cleanly, the saved data must (by definition) be on a persistent volume somewhere. (I’m sure as soon as I say that, someone will have an exception to such a rule of thumb, but it works for me…)

When backing up databases, the key is to generate some kind of checkpoint. Regardless of the state your backup software catches the data when it does it’s pass, the checkpoint is a state that the database is internally consistent. For the most part, files outside the 389 database are configuration oriented and will not be changing with a running system. Other organizations use things like Git to store configurations to even avoid that problem.

tl;dr: Checkpoint the database before you back up, and you should be fine.