How to restore Gitlab backup to another disk/folder

How to Use GitLab Migrations
1

Dear all,

Need your help and knowledge on this situation:
We have a self-hosted Gitlab on a cloud Ubuntu server. Gitlab is growing in size and maxed out disk space. We had to upgrade it to a bigger cloud instance type, this includes disk, vCPU and RAM hence the cost is over our heads. So we went and do:

  • Backup Gitlab to a new backup disk by changing the config: success
    gitlab_rails[‘backup_path’] = “/mnt/gitlab_backup/backups”

  • Install Gitlab to a new Ubuntu server (low performance, low disk space, low cost) - same version (15.9.1-ee.0)

  • Create another disk to add to this new server /mnt/gitlab_data/gitlab (the disk is upgradable separately from cloud instance config hence it’d be easier to upgrade next time it maxed out while maintain a low cost)

  • I’ve mounted the backup disk to the new server, copied all config files, granted all required permission, reconfigured gitlab-ctl, Ubuntu 22.04 LTS

Problem: gitlab-backup restore will only restore the backup to their default location /var/opt/gitlab/, not my new disk /mnt/gitlab_data/gitlab.

I tried using gitlab-backup restore -C /mnt/gitlab_data/gitlab/ but ran into ‘No Rakefile found’ error.

If someone know how to deal with this, please help enlightening me.

Thank you very much.

2

You would need to change the mount point also in /etc/gitlab/gitlab.rb in quite a few places where /var/opt/gitlab appears.

If it was me, I would do it differently, and would have done this.

  1. Create new Ubuntu server.
  2. Mount disk to /var/opt/gitlab instead of /mnt/wherever (saves editing gitlab.rb as mentioned)
  3. Install Gitlab
  4. Run reconfigure to get a basic running version of Gitlab
  5. Restore backup

For the additional disk, it doesn’t matter where you mount it, so easier just to keep it with the default location of /var/opt/gitlab. In the future that disk can most likely be mounted elsewhere in other VM/VPS’s.

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3

That definitely worth a try. To be honest, I’m not an advanced Linux user hence mounting a volume directly to /var/opt/gitlab is a new option to me. Thank you for your help. Will keep you updated with the result. :heart:

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4

The directory won’t exist at first, since Gitlab isn’t installed, but this isn’t a problem, since you’ll just do:

mkdir /var/opt/gitlab

then mount the partition to /var/opt/gitlab - empty for a new install, then you can just install Gitlab as normal and then do your restore after this and it will all restore to the new partition.

6

Everything works like a charm. Now when the disk is full I just need to increase size and extend the partition. Thank you captain.

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