

If you use zfs for docker, dbs and vms you don’t have to shut down anything. Just snapshot and send/recv to sync snapshots to another ZFS drive.
You can even mount and copy the latest snapshot to the cloud with rsync/rclone; probably also borg/restic/kopia. Each applications state will be internally consistent if the snapshot is performed for all data at the same time. If you’re paranoid you can stop everything for a few mins to perform the snapshot, but it’s not really necessary.




Most people don’t know how a computer does anything, let alone the kernel.