Backup/Restore

Papermerge is shipped with two Django managements commands for performing backup/restore operations.

Backup

Invoke backup command using Django's manage.py:

./manage.py backup <optional-location>

where <optional-location> is the path to where to save backup file. If location is not provided, backup file will be saved in current folder.

Backup command can be invoked via docker container as follows:

docker run papermerge/papermerge backup /place/backup/file/here/

The result of backup operation is a (zipped) tar archive which contains following:

1. backup.json file
2. sidecars/ folder
3. docs/ folder
4. username1/, username2, ... i.e. one folder per user with folder title being user's username

backup.json file contains all necessary info to restore the database. (all users, their nodes, tags etc). sidecars/ contains the exact content of /sidecars/ folder docs/ contains the exact content of /docs/ folder

backup.json is used to backup/restore database content. sidecars/ and docs/ are used to backup/restore associated files.

Folder mentioned in point 4. contain same folder structure as users see in web frontend, grouped by username. Instead of documents, in folder structure symbolic links are used. Symbolic links point to the last version (i.e. associated file) of the document. Whatever is in these folders (in , , ...) is NOT used to restore the data (i.e. it is redundant) instead they are human-readable i.e. make backup archive easier to use by human to quickly assert the content of the archive.

Restore

Invoke restore command using Django's manage.py:

./manage.py restore <path/to/backup-archive>

Restore command can be invoked via docker container as follows::

docker run papermerge/papermerge restore backup-archive.tar.gz

Note that before restoring the backup archive, the DB schema should exist i.e. all required tables with correct schema should be already in database. You create schema by running migrate command (this is Django native management command):

./manage.py migrate