(whoa, just found this old draft from months ago which apparently I never saved. Still relevant and hopefully useful to others who come after me)
I have some suggestions for improving this topic, having just wrangled (with success!) with restoring backups as a newbie.
- suggest adding text right at the top explaining that there is an automated, web UI way to restore from backups and link to a topic explaining backup and restore for beginners - I was not aware of this option until after attempting the manual process which is not for the faint of heart. I would even change the title of this howto to add “Advanced” or to specify that the topic is specifically for people with very old discourse sites.
- no automatic backup is kept of the
/var/discourse/containers/app.ymlfile which contains essential SMTP credentials and SSL customizations. Keep a copy of this offsite whenever you change it.
If you are using digital ocean, keep frequent snapshots of your droplets - preferably before each time you run ./launcher rebuild app or do any upgrades. Unfortunately in my case this takes an hour each time and it’s a manual process - but it’s totally worth it if you are not familiar with docker and want to avoid a headache later. 