Did I overwrite my site settings with a cross-instance backup/restore?

Product Support Self-hosting

AI-generated summary

johnr restored a backup from Discourse instance A to instance B and discovered that site settings—such as SSO login—were overwritten, and they lost access to their admin account on B. Attempts to log in via u/admin-login using the original DISCOURSE_DEVELOPER_EMAILS failed with “Unknown email address” and rate-limiting errors. merefield clarified that SiteSettings are included in backups because they’re essential for site operation and suggested running rake admin:create inside the container to create a new admin user. pfaffman confirmed that all settings are replaced during restore except those explicitly defined in the app.yml file, and referenced helpful guides on configuring S3 storage and setting up a staging server. johnr thanked the community for the prompt and helpful responses.

1

My company is evaluating Discourse and I have created two instances, A and B. I wanted to check out the backup/restore functionality as it might apply to different instances and restored a backup from instance A to instance B.

It appears that the data was successfully migrated from A to B, however it also appears that some site settings were overwritten. For example, instance B is now using SSO to sign in when that was not enabled on B before. The admin accounts were different between A and B, and I no longer appear to have access to my admin account on B.

I have tried u/admin-login with the original app.yml’s DISCOURSE_DEVELOPER_EMAILS value with no success (“Unknown email address” and eventually “You’ve performed this action too many times…”). I have been trying different things like launcher rebuild app, but I can’t seem to make any progress in getting to the admin panel of instance B.

Any help would be greatly appreciated! How can I get back into my admin account on instance B?

2

SiteSettings are a part of a back-up, why wouldn’t they be? They contain critical info for running a specific site.

on the command line, within the container you can run:

rake admin:create to create a new admin user so you can get in.

3

All settings are replaced except those set in the yml file. See Configure an S3 compatible object storage provider for uploads f for an example of doing that. Also, that’s a convenient way to restore one backup to another server. There is also a topic about setting up a staging server with examples. Set up a staging server

4

Thanks so much for the quick replies and follow-up information! You have a lot of good information in these forums. Cheers!