I see there’s a checkbox for “readonly mode during backup” which is not checked by default. I suppose backups work fine without it - when might this feature be needed?
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The only time I’ve used the read only mode is when I’m migrating a forum from one host to another.
There can be other use cases but that’s the only one I’ve found useful.
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I imagine the global ‘read only mode’ is useful for the case of migration. (The setting in question, presumably, makes the forum read-write again when the backup is done, which makes it not so useful for migration.)
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I’m quite sure we can remove the readonly_mode_during_backup setting. It’s off by default anyway. The chance of creating a backup in an inconsistent state is negligible compared to the annoyance of showing a read-only banner to all users everytime a backup is created.
pg_dump runs in a serializable transaction, so an inconsistent state can only happen when Discourse is in the middle of persisting data into multiple tables without using a transaction exactly at the beginning of the database dump. That should be quite rare.
Enabling that setting enables read-only mode only for the duration of database backup. Not a second longer, so it’s not really usable for migrating to another host. You’d be better of in using the “Enable read-only” button in /admin/backups.
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Sounds good to me! Did you want to take that?
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Hmm… Would it be better, and possible, to ensure that transactions are always used? In the meantime, those with very large and busy forums and a deep sense of anxiety can use this “readonly mode during backup” option.
The site setting was removed here:
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