Description

This article describes the procedure for backing up (backup) and restoring (restore) the Swarmica application installed on the customer's side (on-premise) using the standard functions of the basic operating system.

This article provides minimal instructions for creating backups for recovery after a failure or data migration to another server without guaranteeing the recovery speed (RTO) for all data at the time of backup.

What needs to be saved:

• Configuration files located in the Swarmica installation folder (default /root/swarmica)
• Database (using Postgres)
• User files (Docker Volumes)

Creating a backup (backup)

Configuration files

Save the contents of the /root/swarmica folder:

tar -cvjf sw-backup-configs.tbz /root/swarmica\
    /root/.docker/

Database

Run the pg_dump command in the swarmica-postgres container:

cd /root/swarmica
source .env
docker exec -it --env-file .env swarmica-postgres pg_dump -Fc --clean -U$POSTGRES_USER $POSTGRES_DB -f /backups/db.`date +%Y%m%d%H%M%S`.sql

If necessary, copy the dump file to the server (this may be necessary if you plan to restore only the database on another server, for example, for testing):

docker cp swarmica-postgres:/backups/db.YOURDATE.sql ./

User files

User data is stored in Docker Volumes with the following names:

• swarmica_ugc
• swarmica_runtime
• swarmica_cron_d
• swarmica_ai_assistant

To back up all files, run the following command:

tar -cvjf sw-backup-files.tbz \
    /var/lib/docker/volumes/swarmica_swarmica_postgres_data_backups/_data/ \
    /var/lib/docker/volumes/swarmica_swarmica_ugc/_data/ \
    /var/lib/docker/volumes/swarmica_swarmica_runtime/_data/ \
    /var/lib/docker/volumes/swarmica_ai_assistant/_data/

IMPORTANT! Make sure there is enough free space on the disk where you create the backup archive to accommodate all user data.

• Command to check free space df -h
• Command to check the size of user data docker system df | grep Volumes

Restoring a backup (restore)

Before restoring a backup on another server, you must install all the required software for Swarmica to work.

apt-get update && \
apt-get install --no-install-recommends -y \
      curl \
      jq \
      host \
      python3 \
      docker.io \
      docker-compose-v2

dnf install -y \
      curl \
      jq \
      bzip2 \
      python3.12 \
      docker-ce \
      docker-compose

1. Copy to the target server and unzip the archives created in the previous step:

tar -xvjf sw-backup-files.tbz -C /
tar -xvjf sw-backup-configs.tbz -C /

2. Pull the container images:

cd /root/swarmica
docker compose pull

This step can be skipped if you are restoring data on the same server where the backup was created

3. Start the Postgres container:

docker compose up -d postgres

4. If you are restoring the database dump on a 'clean' installation, first copy it into the container:

docker cp db.YOURDATE.sql swarmica-postgres:/backups/

This step can be skipped if you are restoring data from a backup created following all steps in this article.

5. Restore the dump:

cd /root/swarmica
source .env
docker exec -it --env-file .env swarmica-postgres pg_restore --if-exists --clean -U$POSTGRES_USER -d$POSTGRES_DB /backups/db.YOURDATE.sql

6. Start the remaining containers:

docker compose up -d

7. Perform the final procedures:

docker exec --env-file .env -it swarmica-django-1 python manage.py post_start