Do not ever push to production without testing things first. I went and moved us to the beta branch because this commit caught my eye and I wanted us to have the emoji picker fixed: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy-ui/commit/ae4c37ed4450b194719859413983d6ec651e9609
The beta branch was on dockerhub so I thought that it was at least minimally tested. I was sorely mistaken. Lemmy (the backend) itself would load, but lemmy-ui (the actual website that renders everything) would keep crashing when attempting to load. I couldn't roll back because the database was migrated to this beta version and it couldn't migrate back to the old version when attempting to launch said old version.
I had no choice but to restore from backup. We've lost a whole day's worth of posts (anything after 3AM CST.) I'm really really sorry.. 
I was just so excited to be able to unveil this, I didn't take my time with actually testing it.
I guess I didn't clarify. I have a cron job that automatically turns the server off via docker compose and runs the Borg backup which seems to work perfectly. There's no manual intervention at all. I'm not manually turning it off and manually doing the backup.
I really appreciate your suggestions, though. I just don't want to touch something that saved my bacon already and risk having some workflow somewhere screw up without my being aware of it when I need to restore from backup. This probably will all be moot since moving to a dedi is a possibility in the future. So then I'd be able to use a hypervisor and just full on backup VM images.
Yeah. Makes sense - best to have something that you absolutely know works. Having the dedi will be really nice - having control of the hypervisor should let you avoid a lot of issues and make testing new updates easier (clone prod, update the clone, test on the clone, swap LB backend to point to the clone and drain old backend, hold old prod VM for a bit to make rollback quick, if needed).