Backing Up Oracle Free Tier Machines: A DIY Solution

I have heard that Oracle sometimes blows its free tier machines away randomly, and I had left a backup solution too long. Sure, I backed up the boot volume in Oracle’s console, but this doesn’t include an easy way to pull those images down, so I needed to work something out for myself. I tried using Veeam, but since the machine is an ARM64 Ubuntu machine, there was no support for that… I had an existing Tailscale network, and I wondered if I could use that to generate the image and send it over the wire to the machine at my place… here are the steps I took to get things working! Enjoy!

The Problem with Oracle’s Free Tier

Oracle’s free tier is a great way to get started with cloud computing, but it comes with some limitations. One of the biggest limitations is the lack of control over the underlying infrastructure. When you create a machine in the free tier, you don’t have the ability to easily back up the entire machine, including the operating system and all installed software.

The Limitations of Oracle’s Console

Oracle’s console does provide a way to back up the boot volume, but this doesn’t include an easy way to pull those images down. This means that if you need to restore your machine, you’ll have to do it manually, which can be time-consuming and error-prone.

The Solution: Using Tailscale and DD

I decided to use my existing Tailscale network to generate an image of the machine and send it over the wire to my machine at home. Here are the steps I took:

1. Install Tailscale: If you haven’t already, install Tailscale on your Oracle machine. This will give you a secure way to access your machine from anywhere.
2. Create a Tailscale Network: Create a Tailscale network and add your Oracle machine to it. This will give you a secure way to access your machine from anywhere.
3. Map the backup location. To mount a network drive on the machine, check out this post.
4. Use DD to Create an Image: Use the dd command to create an image of the machine. This will create a binary image of the entire machine, including the operating system and all installed software.

sudo dd if=/dev/sda of=/mnt/e/Backup/Oracle/image.img bs=1M conv=sparse status=progress

4. Transfer the Image: Transfer the image to your machine at home using Tailscale. You can do this by using the scp command or by mounting the Tailscale network as a file system.

Restoring the Image

If you need to restore the image, you can use the dd command again, but this time with the if option pointing to the image file and the of option pointing to the device file of the disk you want to restore.

sudo dd if=/mnt/e/Backup/Oracle/image.img of=/dev/sda bs=1M conv=sparse status=progress