Backups

Backup works with database and files in the local folder, if you have s3 setup and/or managed separate database, this guide doesn't apply.

Run backup.sh from your Doska directory any time:

./backup.sh

install.sh downloads it for you. If you set the stack up by hand, fetch it first:

curl -O https://raw.githubusercontent.com/romenkova/doska/main/backup.sh
chmod +x backup.sh

It writes two files to ./backups/, both stamped with the same timestamp:

install.sh runs this for you before it redeploys over an existing database.

Restoring

Database

Restore the database into an empty one, with only db running. A booted server has already migrated the schema and seeded the admin account, and the dump would land on tables and rows that already exist:

docker compose -f docker-compose.selfhost.yml down --volumes
docker compose -f docker-compose.selfhost.yml up -d --wait db
gunzip -c backups/doska-XXXX.sql.gz | \
  docker compose -f docker-compose.selfhost.yml exec -T db \
    psql -v ON_ERROR_STOP=1 -U doska doska

Keep ON_ERROR_STOP=1. Without it psql exits 0 even when every statement failed. Restoring onto a database that isn't empty prints a wall of errors and still looks like it succeeded.

Attachments

Put the attachments back into the recreated volume, before the server starts:

docker compose -f docker-compose.selfhost.yml up -d --no-start server
gunzip -c backups/doska-files-XXXX.tar.gz | \
  docker run --rm -i -v <project>_doska-files:/data alpine tar xf - -C /data
docker compose -f docker-compose.selfhost.yml up -d

<project> is the compose project name, by default the lowercased name of the directory you run from (with anything outside a-z0-9_- dropped, and any leading - or _ stripped), or COMPOSE_PROJECT_NAME if you set one. docker compose config | head -1 prints the one in effect.

Restore both halves from the same timestamp. The database holds the rows that name the files, so a mismatched pair leaves cards pointing at blobs that aren't there.

What the script does

1. Checks that docker and either docker compose or docker-compose are available, and that docker-compose.selfhost.yml sits in the current directory, otherwise you are not in your Doska directory and it stops.
2. Works out the compose project name (COMPOSE_PROJECT_NAME, or the lowercased name of the directory, normalised the way compose normalises it), that is the prefix on the volumes.
3. Creates ./backups/ and takes one timestamp, shared by both files.
4. Database. Skipped if .env sets DATABASE_URL (yours to back up through your provider), or if the doska-pgdata volume doesn't exist yet. Otherwise it starts the db service, waits up to 30s for pg_isready, and runs pg_dump into a temp file before gzipping it to backups/doska-<stamp>.sql.gz. If pg_dump fails, nothing is written.
5. Attachments. Skipped if there is no doska-files volume. Otherwise a throwaway alpine container mounts the volume read-only and tars it to backups/doska-files-<stamp>.tar.gz.