Why won't my remote backups restore?

Installation
1

I migrated servers last night and just could not get the remote backup to restore.

Instead, I was presented with this error in the backup log.

Remote Backups

EXCEPTION: Failed to download archive to tmp directory.

I tried over and over, and nothing worked. I can make backups successfully, I just cannot restore from those remote backups. I’m using BackBlaze, and this is what my app.yml file looks like.

DISCOURSE_S3_ENDPOINT: <url>
DISCOURSE_S3_ACCESS_KEY_ID: <key_id>
DISCOURSE_S3_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY: <key>
DISCOURSE_S3_BACKUP_BUCKET: <bucket>

I hope someone has some insight here…

Local Backups

Here’s a tip for someone else…

I then tried local backups. A long story short, they didn’t work, and that’s when I noticed the backup file ended in .tar instead of .tar.gz. As it turns out, as soon as the backup is downloaded, Safari was opening the archive file which changes the file extension from .tar.gz to .tar. So that’s why local backups were not restoring.

So I unchecked this box:

Screen Shot 2024-09-22 at 12.05.23 PM
Screen Shot 2024-09-22 at 12.05.23 PM1884×1144 194 KB

Re-downloaded my backup file from BackBlaze and the .tar.gz file extension was intact. From there, the restore worked as expected.

2

Is your disk full?

3

No, there’s 20GB avalible.

4

Wait. Why are you downloading with safari and not letting discourse pull the backup from s3?

1 Like
5

Two separate issues.

In the first instance, I was trying to restore from a BackBlaze backup, via the Discourse UX. I could see the backup files within the Discourse UX. However, when I click “Restore,” with it enabled in Discourse, the backup failed to restore for the reason cited above.

The second issue, since the first failed, was me restore locally, which is the only option that did work.

1 Like