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Backing up PieFed instance? (piefed.social)

submitted 2 months ago by Phoenix1@piefed.social to c/piefed_meta@piefed.social

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Hello! I've recently been testing out PieFed (I followed the Docker install instructions), it's actually working quite well... However, I'm a bit of a newbie system administrator, I was wondering if there was a guide or documentation available on how to back up/restore a PieFed instance installed this way? Being able to back up and restore the instance is the one stumbling block I need to get past in order to self host PieFed, so I would certainly appreciate any help that people can provide 😀 Thanks!

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[–] wjs018@piefed.wjs018.xyz 1 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (1 children)

I haven't had to restore from my backup in production yet, but I run two instances and just periodically rsync the mapped volumes to a backup folder. I also use S3 for my media, so it is really just the database that is critical.

Doing dev work, when I know I am about to really fuck up my database doing an experiment, I will rsync myself a backup...blow everything up...tear down the docker stack and swap back in my database folder and it is good to go.

[–] Phoenix1@piefed.social 2 points 2 months ago (1 children)

I appreciate all of the advice, it's really just my inexperience that's a problem here. It sounds as if it would be a simple matter of dumping the database from the Docker image and backing up the appropriate directories, but I'm having a heck of a time figuring out how to do that exactly. I'll keep trying though, but if any system admin out there could provide some concrete examples, I'd really appreciate it!

[–] wjs018@piefed.wjs018.xyz 1 points 2 months ago (1 children)

I am not much of a sysadmin either and have had to get help from some other instance admins in the past. Here is the exact process I go through to manually make and then restore a backup. I don't have this automated since I just work in dev environments, but you could put this in a shell script and schedule it with cron or something like that.

Here is how I make the backup (pgdata folder in my case):

# Prerequisite: navigate to the pyfedi folder

# Shut down the docker containers
docker compose down

# Wait for the containers to shut down...

# Then make the backup of the db volume
sudo rsync -a pgdata/ pgdata_backup

And here is how I restore the backup if I mess up my db:

# Again, need to be in the pyfedi folder

# Shut down the docker containers
docker compose down

# Wait for the containers to shut down...

# Delete the messed up db folder
sudo rm -r pgdata

# Rename the backup folder to swap it back in
sudo mv pgdata_backup pgdata

# Start the containers back up
docker compose up -d

[–] Phoenix1@piefed.social 1 points 2 months ago

I'd like to thank you very much for this, it's easy to follow and it explains each of the steps well! I will go about turning this into a script for cron!