Hi there, Has anyone got some recipes or stories to share of how they ensure their forum’s resilience? If something goes horribly wrong do you have a backup you can quickly spin up? Do you have a method for creating staging forums so you can test things without breaking your site? Thanks Clement

I recommend putting backups on S3. If you do that then if you have your yml files you can spin up a new server, clone discourse and rebuild with the latest backup. You can see Configure automatic backups for Discourse and Configure an S3 compatible object storage provider for uploads (and do just the part for backups). You can Set up a staging server.

Keeping backups in an external object storage (S3-compatible) is :100:. I’ll add and recommend the peace of mind from the practice of downloading backups and occasionally testing them. I even use Discourse to track downloading them (I leave the list of the backups directory as a the message): [Screenshot 2022-10-12 at 10-57-23 💾 talkgroup backup log - talkgroup] (I now track downloading backups in my family forums, so eventually my kid will be assigned the task. :star_struck:)

I wrote a good bit on backup in my opinionated discourse deployment document. I don’t know if it will be useful, but thought I’d mention it.

I had to roll back on the idea after I was getting errors with the ACL list issue. Has anyone successfully set up an S3 backup and uploads recently?

Backing up your forum

Product Support

cokestroke (Clement Oke) October 12, 2022, 12:23pm 3

As ever Jay - You da man!
Thanks,
Clement

Topic		Replies	Views
What are the most basic but reliable ways to ensure a Discourse forum can always be recovered? Self-hosting	11	532	October 11, 2026
Proper way to secure/backup Discourse on self-hosted server? Self-hosting hosting	9	2634	April 22, 2020
Best Practices for Backups Sysadmins backups , explanation	0	3903	April 20, 2020
Configure automatic backups for Discourse Self-Hosting backups , how-to	44	305262	May 19, 2026
Recommended backup process for very large forum? Product Support	6	1482	July 11, 2017

Backing up your forum

Related topics