Hi, as per the restore, you don’t need to unpack the tar, just put it in /var/opt/gitlab/backups and make sure it is the only one in there. Then following the Gitlab docs:
https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/raketasks/backup_restore.html#restore-for-installation-from-source
Then reconfigure and start everything. Obviously, the backup must be from the same version of gitlab that you are trying to restore.
My upgrades were on Debian/Ubuntu so there are different commands to run to actually do this. Other difficulties you might encounter depends on which version of CentOS you have installed, since if CentOS 6, then you will not be able to go to the latest version since it’s no longer supported. Latest version for EL6 is 13.6.6. So I don’t know which version of CentOS you have installed to provide exact instructions. Debian/Ubuntu allows me to use the repositories and upgrade to a specific version, but from what I see, that command doesn’t exist for RHEL/CentOS, so would mean you downloading manually the appropriate RPM:
if you are not using CE, then change it to gitlab-ee. Just verify this before downloading and starting your upgrade, as downgrading EE to CE can cause other issues - whilst possible, there are extra steps to take.
Easiest way is:
rpm -qa | grep -i gitlab
and you should get a list of which gitlab rpm is installed - it should have ce or ee in the name to differentiate.
But generally yes, to upgrade:
rpm -Uvh package-name.rpm
EDIT:
https://docs.gitlab.com/omnibus/update/#multi-step-upgrade-using-the-official-repositories
you can download particular versions using yum and the repos. Eg:
yum install gitlab-ee-12.0.12-ee.0.el7
of course replacing the version number with the one you need to upgrade to - check/verify this using the packages.gitlab.com link that I sent. Or just download the rpm manually, and use rpm -Uvh.