I want to experiment a bit with plugins, theme, etc. locally, to avoid the risk of breaking the real forum. But setting up everything to similar state as the real forum is difficult, so would be great to just restore the backup to the local instance. But how should I do that to avoid the risks like…

Run this from a rails console to anonymize all users except staff: acting_user = User.find(-1) User.all.each do |u| next if u.staff? user = UserAnonymizer.new(u, acting_user).make_anonymous end

Wouldn’t it be simpler to disable all outgoing mails? That’s a global site setting.

Yeah, probably easier to set this setting. However as I understand the backup will overwrite all settings, so there is a chance that some email will be sent between restore completion and disabling mails, unless the source instance had it disabled too during backup. btw I figured out that it proba…

[image] codinghorror: Wouldn’t it be simpler to disable all outgoing mails Under many laws, including the CCPA, it is considered unlawful processing to use unanonymized production data in development and test environments. The chances of a data breach are higher in systems that might contain …

Sorry, my answer was indeed incomplete. When a Discourse backup is restored, outgoing emails are disabled automatically as part of the restore operation. They need to be enabled explicitly after the restore.

You still need to manually disable POP polling if it is configured, otherwise your test instance may start processing inbound email away from the real instance.

Thanks :slight_smile: I think I use some other polling mode, via Direct-delivery incoming email for self-hosted sites Another setting that probably should be disabled is allow index in robots txt And also added Restrict access to your Discourse site with HTTP Basic Authentication .

[image] RGJ: They need to be enabled explicitly after the restore. Do Admins get a message reminding them to enable outgoing emails?

Yes, the warning at the top of the page.

Restore backup to a local instance in a safe/anonymized way

Support

Alex_P (Alex P.) May 21, 2021, 7:43am 6

Yeah, but I meant not during, but after the restore is completed (as I understand after that all processes are immediately resumed?) and before I changed this setting to disable mails.

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Restore backup to a local instance in a safe/anonymized way

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