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How to back up Docker container's data (bind mounts and databases) without system snapshots (XFS filesystem)?

Need Help

Hey,

I'm trying to figure out how to back up my containers' data which includes bind mounted directories and databases. I'm especially worried about the latter since I heard it's not good to back up a live database due to the possibility of data corruption. I found that one way to do the backup is by creating a snapshot however I'm using the XFS filesystem which apparently does not support it - I would either need ZFS or BTRFS (and I don't really want to re-install my whole system because of it unless it's the only/easiest option). Another possibility could be database dumps but since a lot of my containers need a database and they use different database types (PostgreSQL, MySQL, MongoDB...) I would rather not manually create a dump one by one.

Is there a way to do so? What tool would be the best suited for this task?

Thanks!

Posted Aug 31, 2025, 12:20 AM UTC

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