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Why I built a self-hosted centralized backup manager

6.9 relevance
Score Breakdown
technical depth
8
novelty
6
actionability
8
community
5
strategic
5
personal
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Self-hosted backup manager design, relevant to infrastructure and DevOps practices.

2026-04-03 open/source Dev.to
Why I built a self-hosted centralized backup manager
Summary

Arkeep centralizes multi-machine backups via a server/agent model where agents use persistent outbound gRPC streams, eliminating inbound ports and SSH. The server orchestrates Restic-based jobs with pre/post hooks, streaming real-time logs and metrics to a SQLite/PostgreSQL database, while supporting OIDC SSO (e.g., Zitadel) for ISO 27001 compliance.

Key Takeaway

Implement centralized job dispatch via persistent outbound gRPC streams instead of SSH polling to simplify NAT traversal, enhance security, and enable real-time monitoring for multi-node systems.

Why it matters

This demonstrates a production-grade agent orchestration pattern using outbound-only gRPC streams, directly applicable to building secure, auditable distributed systems in cloud-native environments.