# How to recover my broken (not web-accessible) Discourse installation after failed upgrade **URL:** \ **Category:** Self-hosting\ **Created:** [February 16, 2020, 9:23pm UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/how-to-recover-my-broken-not-web-accessible-discourse-installation-after-failed-upgrade/141760 "2020-02-16T21:23:53Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 1\ **Showing post:** 1
**Author:** ![joa](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/j/dec6dc/32.png) [@joa](https://meta.discourse.org/u/joa)\ **Post date:** [February 16, 2020, 9:23pm UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/how-to-recover-my-broken-not-web-accessible-discourse-installation-after-failed-upgrade/141760/1 "2020-02-16T21:23:53Z")
I just attempted to upgrade [my Discourse installation](https://forum.stadtteilgenossenschaft-wik.de) to the latest beta (2.4.0 beta 11) via the web update and now it is inaccessible (try for yourself, returns HTTP 500 errors). # Context My installed version was still 2.4.0 beta 6, I was trying to upgrade to 2.4.0 beta 11. I think I had a fairly vanilla install, don’t remember whether I had any custom plugins (and can’t look it up now) but at most 1-2. I kept most of the default Discourse settings. # What I did I clicked on the one-click browser update link in the update notification mail I got, which brought me to `/admin/upgrade`. According to the web updater, I had to first do some docker manager update, before I could update the actual discourse version, so I picked that. Some stuff ran through and after about half of the progress there was a message above the web log output screen saying that something went wrong during the upgrade and I should check the logs. I scrolled through the logs but nothing jumped out to me directly. I sadly failed to save the log and instead simply reloaded the page, hoping that I could maybe just retry the install and assuming that the failure had caused the upgrade to simply be rolled back. Interestingly, the `admin/upgrade/` page then told me, that the docker\_manager was up-to-date and no longer needed to be upgraded, so I (most likely mistakenly) assumed that the upgrade had indeed worked and the error message was a bug. I also checked whether my forum was still running and it was and didn’t seem to have any issues. I was now presented with the option to upgrade the Discourse install itself (which was previously grayed out), so I did. Again stuff was logged to the log output, which I didn’t pay much attention to and after about half the progress bar was filled, a similar error message was displayed above the log output about something having gone wrong. I figured, I’d do the same as before, reload the page (again, I sadly did not to save the log). And as expected, Discourse was now listed as “up-to-date”. This is what I currently see under `admin/upgrade/`: ![Bildschirmfoto 2020-02-16 um 22.10.36](https://global.discourse-cdn.com/meta/original/3X/f/b/fbf322f20ef232196ea33ba6f8a3d17e92df9090.png) **But the actual forum is not working anymore and only returns 500 errors.** # What still works - `/admin/upgrade/` still works and displays that Discourse is up-to-date. - I can also click on the “Processes” tab and get a list of running processes. But even the Backups tab returns a 500 error already and so does `/admin`. I haven’t found any part of the forum that works _except_ for the two tabs under `/admin/upgrade/`. # How to Recover? I don’t have a good idea what went wrong and also don’t know where to start. I don’t even know how to access the logs to figure out what the error was without the web interface. The Discourse installation is hosted in Digital Ocean and I can ssh into the machine and probably the container, but I don’t know where to look for the logs. **A pointer where to look for the logs would be greatly appreciated.** For now, my best idea is to go back to a backup and loose whatever was posted after the last backup (luckily there is not a _lot_ of traffic, so loosing a day of content is acceptable). ### My current plan and what I’m lacking I’ve set up Digital Ocean to make weekly backups from the Droplet and I believe my Discourse installation was setup for daily backups. I never configured S3, so those should still be saved locally. The Digital Ocean Droplet backup is 5 days old, however, I’d prefer not to loose the content from the last couple of days. My rough plan is basically to go back via backups to a known working state for now by doing the following: 1. Download the Discourse backup form today/yesterday. 2. Roll back the whole Droplet via Digital Ocean to the last backup from 5 days ago, so I have a working Discourse installation again. 3. Import the dowloaded backup to get the content back (minus whatever happened after the last Discourse backup) I can do the rollback via DO (step 2) and will figure out how to import the existing backup when I get there (step 3), but I don’t know how to get to the backup without the web interface and with `/admin/backups/` returning HTTP 500 errors. **Where do I have to look to find the backup via SSH/what do I need to be able to restore it after rolling back to the old Droplet backup via DO?** Searching through the forums I’ve only found topics about hosting the backups on S3, but not _where_ they are when they are stored locally. --- _[View the full topic](https://meta.discourse.org/t/how-to-recover-my-broken-not-web-accessible-discourse-installation-after-failed-upgrade/141760)._