Backup and restore

What a backup contains

An instance backup covers the instance as a whole: its databases, its filestore, its addons and the configuration needed to rebuild it. A database backup covers one database.

Which you want depends on what you are protecting against. A database backup answers "someone deleted the wrong records". An instance backup answers "the server is gone".

Taking one

Remote or localagainst prod-1

# odoocli instance backup --instance acme

Remote or localagainst prod-1

# odoocli instance database backup --instance acme

Both run as background jobs, and both take an exclusive lock on the instance.

Requires the Community edition

Taking and restoring instance and database backups. Listing and downloading backups that already exist is never restricted, so an unregistered server can always reach its own data.

Available on Community, Developer, Professional, Provider. Below that the operation is refused and nothing is changed.

Listing and downloading backups that already exist is never restricted. An unregistered server can always reach its own data. That is deliberate: a licensing state must never be able to hold your data hostage.

What an expired licence does

This is the part worth reading before it matters.

Reduced without the Professional edition

Below Professional this is not refused. It runs and does less:

• The backup still runs and still writes its local and FTP copies. Each configured cloud target is skipped and recorded as a failed result for that target, so a licence lapse never means no backup at all.
• Backups held at a cloud provider are omitted from the listing.
• Cloud sources are not offered as restore sources; local and FTP sources still are.

So a licence lapse never means "no backup". It means the copies that leave your building stop, and each skipped target is recorded as a failed result on the job, so the outcome is visible rather than silent.

Similarly, the scheduler stops running unattended backups without a Professional licence, but running one yourself still works:

Requires the Professional edition

Letting the maintenance scheduler run backups, restores, certificate renewals, PostgreSQL maintenance and image cleanup unattended. Starting any of them by hand needs only the edition that operation itself needs, and the housekeeping schedules that look after the server's own state are never restricted.

Available on Developer, Professional, Provider. Below that the operation is refused and nothing is changed.

Where backups go

Every configured target receives a copy. See Targets.

Target	Edition
Local filesystem	Any, including unregistered
FTP	Any, including unregistered
Amazon S3 and S3-compatible	Professional
Azure Blob Storage	Professional

Configuring a cloud provider is allowed at any edition. Only using one is gated, which means you can set an installation up completely before its licence arrives.

Retention

Each target carries its own retention, so a fast local disk can keep a week while off-site storage keeps a year. Retention is applied by the backup job itself, after a successful upload rather than before one.

Related

• Targets
• Restoring
• Schedules