openproject/help/installation-and-operations/operation/backing-up.md

---
sidebar_navigation:
  title: Backing up
  priority: 600
---

# Backing up your OpenProject installation

We advise to backup your OpenProject installation regularly — especially before upgrading to a newer version.

## What should be backed up

In general the following parts of your OpenProject installation should be backed up:

- Data stored in the database
- Configuration files
- Uploaded files (attachments)
- Repositories (typically subversion) if applicable

## Packaged installation (DEB/RPM)

The DEB/RPM packages provide a backup tool which can be used to take a snaphsot
of the current OpenProject installation. This tool will create a backup of
all parts mentioned above. The backup tool is used by executing the following
command:

```bash
sudo openproject run backup
```

The command will create backup files in the following location on your system:

```bash
/var/db/openproject/backup
```

The content of that directory should look very similar to the following (depending on your database engine, you will see either a `mysql-dump-<date>.sql.gz` or a `postgresql-dump-<date>.pgdump` file).

```bash
root@ip-10-0-0-228:/home/admin# ls -al /var/db/openproject/backup/
total 1680
drwxr-xr-x 2 openproject openproject    4096 Nov 19 21:00 .
drwxr-xr-x 6 openproject openproject    4096 Nov 19 21:00 ..
-rw-r----- 1 openproject openproject 1361994 Nov 19 21:00 attachments-20191119210038.tar.gz
-rw-r----- 1 openproject openproject    1060 Nov 19 21:00 conf-20191119210038.tar.gz
-rw-r----- 1 openproject openproject     126 Nov 19 21:00 git-repositories-20191119210038.tar.gz
-rw-r----- 1 openproject openproject  332170 Nov 19 21:00 postgresql-dump-20191119210038.pgdump
-rw-r----- 1 openproject openproject     112 Nov 19 21:00 svn-repositories-20191119210038.tar.gz
```

You should then copy those dump files to a secure location, for instance an S3 bucket or some sort of backup server.