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If you have OP's level of control over the hardware (ie; you have a dedicated server on which you can access the hypervisor), then taking incremental backups of

If you have OP's level of control over the hardware (ie; you have a dedicated server on which you can access the hypervisor), then taking incremental backups of the entire VM is the best way to ensure you can hit the big undo button if anything goes wrong. The most important, and neglected, part of backup & restore, is the restore. If resources permit, this is where I like to use a battle tested solution instead of rolling my own with scripts. For my self hosted servers I use Veeam, but there are many good alternatives. It's nice having the option to restore the entire VM to a specific state, and to also be able to mount backups and pull files if only a few need to be restored. It's also handy to be able to spin up a backup into its own virtual machine.

fivea 5y ago
> (...) taking incremental backups of the entire VM is the best way to ensure you can hit the big undo button if anything goes wrong. What if your server is already compromised? Doesn't that approach ensure your server remains compromised after you pressed the big undo button?
- SturgeonsLaw 5y ago
  Potentially, depends when it happened, which point you restore to, and if the vulnerability that got them in in the first place is still present. If one of my servers got hacked I personally wouldn't risk it, and would just nuke it and rebuild. If everything's in Docker containers then the services can be torn down and spun up easily, and databases can be exported from a backup VM and imported into the new server.