Hello,
It is my understanding that as of GitLab 14.10 there there is now an incremental backup feature. Based on the wording of the link, it sounds like only the git repository data can be incrementally backed up. Is this the case, or does it also back up any new users, issues, groups, etc?
Thanks for any clarifications!
Best,
James
I do not know about that, maybe it is a nice feature, in my case a nice tool that I use : duplicity / duplicity · GitLab
I think you’re right. It is only repositories that can be backed up incrementally, but in most installations that is by far the largest part of any backup, I guess that is also true in cases where incremental backups could be an idea. I don’t know how incremental backups work, in this case whether all the other parts are still included.
The main method for doing incremental backups in Postgres seems to be WAL archiving, and given the size of GitLab’s database (especially compared to the repositories) I’m not sure it’s worth the trouble to integrate that into the existing backup/restore raketasks.
I don’t know duplicity (I considered it for personal use, but went another way) but it doesn’t seem to handle databases nicely so I would be very careful with using that (or any other tool).
Yes, the docs confirm that it is only repositories that are included. What is still not clear is whether wikis are included too, as these are said to be “backed up as part of the repositories group” but not mentioned in the context of incremental backups.
If you want to take advantage of incremental repo backups and back up other things at more or less the same time, you could consider splitting up your backups into multiple jobs based on type, frequency, etc. by using the SKIP parameter appropriately.
By the way: I’m pretty sure that users, issues and groups are all part of the DB backup.