Backup & restore¶

Two stateful surfaces: Postgres (the relational graph) and Garage (the photo bucket).

Postgres¶

Daily logical dump¶

docker compose exec postgres pg_dump -U figurecollector --format=custom \
  > backups/figurecollector-$(date +%Y%m%d).dump

The --format=custom flag produces a binary dump that's smaller, supports parallel restore, and lets you selectively restore specific tables.

Restore¶

# Wipe + restore (destructive)
docker compose down -v
docker compose up -d postgres
docker compose exec -T postgres \
  pg_restore -U figurecollector -d figurecollector --clean --if-exists \
  < backups/figurecollector-20260526.dump
docker compose up -d

Migrations are idempotent (IF NOT EXISTS/OR REPLACE), so the SeaORM runner will skip already-applied migrations on restart.

Garage (S3 bucket)¶

Garage has its own snapshot mechanism but the simplest approach for a single-node Garage is to back up the volumes directly:

docker compose stop garage
tar czf backups/garage-data-$(date +%Y%m%d).tar.gz \
    -C /var/lib/docker/volumes/figurecollector_garage_data .
tar czf backups/garage-meta-$(date +%Y%m%d).tar.gz \
    -C /var/lib/docker/volumes/figurecollector_garage_meta .
docker compose start garage

For multi-node Garage, use garage block sync to replicate to a backup node instead.

What about the photos themselves?¶

Photo content lives in Garage (or the filesystem fallback if you didn't configure S3). Backing up Garage covers it. The photo metadata (which user, which figure, primary flag, position) lives in Postgres — backing up Postgres covers that.

Restore drill¶

Run a restore drill before you need it:

Spin up an empty stack on a side machine.
Restore the Postgres dump + Garage tarballs.
Sign in, browse to a figure with photos, confirm everything works.

A backup you've never restored isn't a backup.

What's not backed up¶

Sessions (tower_sessions rows in Postgres) — recreated on user login.
Service Worker caches — recreated on user visit.
Notification dedup table — rebuilds itself.
The seaql_migrations table — restored along with the rest of Postgres; no special handling.