Backup Package Registry

Hey y’all,
We just finished a successful migration of omnibus gitlab 13.5 from an old centOS 6 server to centOS 8.
We followed all the backup and restore documentation, and everything worked as we expected it to; including LDAP, emails, gitlab ci tokens and whatnot, which surprised us!
However, none of the packages (maven, nuget) made it from the old server to the new one. We could see the packages listed but there was nothing server-side to pull/download.

After manually copying over all the packages (and verifying permissions) all is fine with the package registry, but now we are wondering how to avoid this in the future, and how to make our scheduled backup include our packages?

Any insights?
Thanks

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I just ran into this EXACT thing! We migrated from a RHEL6 to RHEL8 box, and everything went extremely smoothly… until they looked for their packages.I found that they had not been copied over, so I had to manually copy and set permissions and the like.

This is a pretty surprising omission! I even double-checked the backup & restore documentation at Back up and restore GitLab | GitLab and there was nothing. In fact, the very first warning on that page is about how the backup only backs up local files, and not object storage!

This is more motivation for us to move to object storage for our packages, but it is still quite an omission. Is there a rake job for this, or a way to customize your backup/restore process to include packages?

We have just ran into the same issue.

Also have the same problem… the backup and restore is not working for the package registry! This is a serious issue, please fix it!

As per the backup/restore docs, it is clear that package registry is not included in the backups: Redirecting...

Backups do not include:

therefore you need to take additional backups outside of Gitlab to include your package registry files.

Yes, this is included in the documentation now (as of late 2021, early 2022) but when I originally posted this question there was no such mention of package registry. (Neither it being included or not included in the backup)

That being said, yes, this is the answer, the Gitlab Back up and restore task does not copy these files if they are stored on disk. And luckily it is now in the documentation.