Backup & Restore Redmine

nightmare comes true. I google around for a couple of hours to move my running Redmine installation from one server to a new one. There were many suggestions on the google but none worked for me as those were either out dated or incomplete.

In this article we will backup a running Redmine installations with docker-compose from one host to another. As this is more a generic way of backup & restoring docker images it might work for other applications using docker containers. However this approach has been tested for Redmine with Ubuntu servers ( v18.04, v22.04) only.

Backup

You need to backup two things: the container and its volume data
Backing up container as new image

docker-compose ps
docker commit redmine_redmine_1, will give a hash, use it below
docker tag 818d074ec46f29ec0c9e2093ab57b0f redminee:v1
docker images
docker-compose ps
docker commit redmine_postgres_1
docker tag e90f7736dfb316338abc8621296ac448ac postgresee:v1
docker images
docker save redminee:v1 -o redminee.tar
docker save postgresee:v1 -o postgresee.tar

Backing up volume data
Find out location of volume: docker inspect redmine*redmine-data, syntax: <directory>_<volume_in_compose_file>

sudo -i
tar cvf redmine_redmine-data.tar redmine_redmine-data/
tar cvf redmine_redmine-postgres-data.tar redmine_redmine-postgres-data/

Restore

Restoring volume data

sudo -i
cd /var/lib/docker/volumes/
tar xvf redmine_redmine-data.tar
tar xvf redmine_redmine-postgres-data.tar
chown systemd-coredump:systemd-coredump redmine_redmine-* -Rf

Restoring images

docker images, no image exists with the same name
docker load < redminee.tar
docker load < postgresee.tar
docker images

Settings

Change docker compose file to use images
- postgresee:v1
- redminee:v1
Start
- docker-compose up
- Browse to http://localhost:7071

Backup
Restore
Settings