# Backup your OpenProject installation

**Note:** this guide only applies if you've installed OpenProject using our DEB/RPM packages.

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

## How to backup

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:

```
sudo openproject run backup
```

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

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

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

```bash
root@test-packager-backup:/opt/openproject# ls -l /var/db/openproject/backup/
total 24
-rw-r----- 1 openproject openproject  117 Apr  8 09:55 attachments-20150408095521.tar.gz
-rw-r----- 1 openproject openproject  667 Apr  8 09:55 conf-20150408095521.tar.gz
-rw-r----- 1 openproject openproject 8298 Apr  8 09:55 postgresql-dump-20150408095521.sql.gz
-rw-r----- 1 openproject openproject  116 Apr  8 09:55 svn-repositories-20150408095521.tar.gz
```



## How to restore

The backup created with the tool consists of four parts
which are all compressed using `gzip`. Except the  database dump these parts
can be restored by decompressing the `*.tar.gz` files and copy the content to the
proper location. The command to untar and unzip the `*.tar.gz` files looks like
this (using sample file names from above):

```bash
tar vxfz attachments-20150408095521.tar.gz
```



### Database

The `<dbuser>`, `<dbhost>` and `<dbname>` variables have to be replaced with
the values that are container in the `DATABASE_URL` setting of your
installation. This setting can be seen by running:

```
openproject config:get DATABASE_URL
#=> e.g.: postgresql://dbusername:dbpassword@dbhost:dbport/dbname
```



#### PostgreSQL

To restore the PostgreSQL dump please use the `pg_restore` command utilities.



```bash
pg_restore -h <dbhost> -u <dbuser> -W <dbname>
```



First the dump has to be extracted (unzipped) and then restored. The command
used should look very similar to this: