Cannot Backup my Development Instance (Fails)

Hey,

First time setting up Discourse here! I’m trying to backup my development instance of Discourse as I am ready to host it online, but when going in Admin>Backups>Backup, it says Backup Failed. Here’s my log: [2018-07-12 20:48:43] 'cryptoguard' has started the backup! [2018-07-12 20:48:4 - Pastebin.com

What’s going wrong here? The instance is installed locally on my Macbook Pro and I want to make a backup to host it on some server.

Hmm it looks like this is related to

https://github.com/discourse/discourse/commit/83110a1a812140382167e8f5339c8bde3ee6610d

[2018-07-12 20:48:45] EXCEPTION: Failed to archive uploads.
tar: Option --warning=no-file-changed is not supported
Usage:
  List:    tar -tf <archive-filename>
  Extract: tar -xf <archive-filename>
  Create:  tar -cf <archive-filename> [filenames...]
  Help:    tar --help

Can you try upgrading tar to at least 1.23?

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What worked for me on a mac was installing gnu-tar with Homebrew and then adding it to my PATH in my .bash_profile.

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Hmm @pfaffman can you confirm why this change was needed? It looks like we raised the bar on our tar version requirement a lot.

I’m on version 1.30 :confused:

That did the trick! Thanks a lot mate :pray:

Hmm. Seemed like a good idea at the time.

I can’t recall the details, but apparently I was having backups fail because something changed while the backup was happening. The only way that I can think of for files to change during a backup is for something to get moved to tombstone, or a file is being uploaded when tar starts?

I suspect that another solution (other than for luck during a backup) is to turn on read only during backup.

Having to install homebrew to make development work on the Mac does seem onerous. I have been using the gnu utilities for decades, so I didn’t think about them not being available on the Mac.

I guess the simple thing is to revert my change. Or we could test which version of tar is available.

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Installing Homebrew is a part of the Mac setup guide. If gnu-tar needs to be used for compressing backups, then we just need to update Install Discourse on macOS for development.

5 Likes

Oh! Then it’s not so much to ask after all!

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