Coherent Server Snapshots?

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    May 12, 2020
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    So I decided to try my hand at setting up some server management tooling (similar to what I did for Minecraft), and something I can't figure out is how to get coherent snapshots.

    What do I mean by "coherent"? Meaning that it is a specific snapshot in time, without the server interrupting (leading to corruption), able to be copied from the working directory to elsewhere, so it can be stashed or copied offsite or whatever.

    It seems like the only technique to do this with the starmade dedicated server is to turn off SECTOR_AUTOSAVE_SEC and have your management system call /force_save regularly. I'm not a fan of this because if the admin system crashes or has a problem, you'll be vulnerable to data loss. (And I'm not sure how this interacts with the presumed save on unload.)

    I suppose you could also use filesystem tricks (eg, run on zfs and use the zfs native snapshot feature) to get save copies, but I'm also not a big fan of this because this raises the complexity and requirements of running a server.

    What's the best practice for getting good snapshots from a server? Please no gui--it must be able to be used automatically, without human intervention.