When your domain is close to running out, you should either get an email from your registrar asking you to renew, or a payment notification telling you that your domain will be renewed for whatever price automatically.
If the payment fails, the domain will be temporarily suspended. There is a grace period where nobody can buy that domain, allowing you to settle the missed payment. If you do not settle the payment, the domain will be put back up for sale
None of this affects whatever services you’re running on your Pi, people just won’t be able to connect to it if your domain is suspended.
I’d suggest looking into SSL certificates (Letsencrypt is free) as well as Cloudflare for masking your Pi (your home) IP address from users of your instance - do note this has privacy implications: cloudflare becomes a MITM for your site
Freenom is being sued by Meta (Facebook) at the moment for supposedly not dealing with spam domains. I would not recommend using a Freenom domain if/when they reopen registrations: FMHY had their old Freenom lemmy instance domain seized by Mali’s government
Your instance will still exist, and federation should continue as normal if you manage to reclaim the original domain.
If you have to switch to a new one, however, federation will be very awkward. Other instances will essentially treat you as a brand-new instance, and mirrors of old content will be “orphaned” and no longer sync.
I’m using Autorestic, a wrapper for Restic that lets you specify everything in a config file. It can fire hooks before/after backups so I’ve added it to my healthchecks instance to know if backups were completed successfully.
One caveat with Restic: it relies on hostnames to work optimally (for incremental backups) so if you’re using Autorestic in a container, set the host: option in the config file. My backups took a few hours each night until I fixed this - now they’re less than 30 minutes.
Borg (specifically Borg Matic) has been working very well for me. I run it on my main server and then on my Nas I have a Borg server docker container as the repository location.
I also have another repository location my on friends Nas. Super easy to setup multiple targets for the same data.
I will probably also setup a Borg base account for yet another backup.
What I liked a lot here was how easy it is to make automatic backups, retention policy and multiple backup locations .
Open source was a requirement so you can never get locked out of your data. Self hosted. Finally the ability to mount the backup as a volume / drive. So if I want a specific file, I mount that snapshot and just copy that one file over.
selfhosted
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