Code only backups

[jdaviescoates]

With apps like Nextcloud that 1) have lots of apps/ plugins that need their own updates, and 2) have lots of data stored in them, I'd love to be able to run a "code only" backup before updating apps/ plugins

Because I'd like to always do a quick backup of my Nextcloud before updating the apps (in case the app update breaks something), but I tend not to bother because I've got so much data stored in there that the backup isn't quick.

Make sense?

[odie]

@jdaviescoates It makes a lot of sense. If we had this + an option to have "on-app-basis backup policy", I'd be really happy!

The "Code only" option would be perfect for apps like NextCloud, Immich etc. to run every day.

Then, I could do a weekly or monthly "full backup", using the "on app basis" backup policy. This would retain a few backups of the data in data-intensive apps like Immich and Nextcloud, but avoid having to fill every day backups with huge loads of mostly unchanged data (ie. old photos in Immich don't change, so having the option to only frequently do a full backup would be perfect.)

[fbartels]

@jdaviescoates said in Code only backups:

Make sense?

Kind of, but not really. The app code from my perspective does not need a backup, as its read-only and comes from a container registry anyways. If you want to use the code from a previous app release, you can just pull it again. You can see all container versions of the nextcloud app at https://hub.docker.com/r/cloudron/com.nextcloud.cloudronapp/tags for example.

So what I think you want is the ability to restore a previous version of an app, without restoring the data of the app itself. so you can do a rollback to a previous version, but keep the app data in the state just before doing the restore.

[girish]

@fbartels If I understood correctly, the issue is that the Cloudron package has /app/data/apps where it stores the nextcloud apps. I think @jdaviescoates wants to update a single nextcloud app and if it bombs, they want to roll back that directory alone.

But of course the suggested approach doesn't work cleanly (not in a generic way atleast). Consider:

1. Nextcloud app updates
2. It tries to do some migration and bombs mid way
3. We have to roll everything back and not just the code...

But if you want to risk it and leave the DB in some unknown state, you can always copy /app/data/apps as /app/data/apps-13May2013 using the file manager. The old fashioned way of backing up files