lemmy/docs/src/administration_backup_and_restore.md

Backup and Restore Guide

Docker and Ansible

When using docker or ansible, there should be a volumes folder, which contains both the database, and all the pictures. Copy this folder to the new instance to restore your data.

Incremental Database backup

To incrementally backup the DB to an .sql file, you can run:

docker exec -t FOLDERNAME_postgres_1 pg_dumpall -c -U lemmy >  lemmy_dump_`date +%Y-%m-%d"_"%H_%M_%S`.sql

A Sample backup script

#!/bin/sh
# DB Backup
ssh MY_USER@MY_IP "docker exec -t FOLDERNAME_postgres_1 pg_dumpall -c -U lemmy" >  ~/BACKUP_LOCATION/INSTANCE_NAME_dump_`date +%Y-%m-%d"_"%H_%M_%S`.sql

# Volumes folder Backup
rsync -avP -zz --rsync-path="sudo rsync" MY_USER@MY_IP:/LEMMY_LOCATION/volumes ~/BACKUP_LOCATION/FOLDERNAME

Restoring the DB

If you need to restore from a pg_dumpall file, you need to first clear out your existing database

# Drop the existing DB
docker exec -i FOLDERNAME_postgres_1 psql -U lemmy -c "DROP SCHEMA public CASCADE; CREATE SCHEMA public;"

# Restore from the .sql backup
cat db_dump.sql  |  docker exec -i FOLDERNAME_postgres_1 psql -U lemmy # restores the db

# This also might be necessary when doing a db import with a different password.
docker exec -i FOLDERNAME_postgres_1 psql -U lemmy -c "alter user lemmy with password 'bleh'"

More resources

• https://stackoverflow.com/questions/24718706/backup-restore-a-dockerized-postgresql-database