gotosocial/docs/admin/backup_and_restore.md

Backup and Restore

In certain conditions, it may be desirable to be able to back up a GoToSocial instance, and then to restore it again later, or just save the backup somewhere.

Some potential scenarios:

• You want to close down your instance but you might create it again later and you don't want to break federation.
• You need to migrate to a different database for some reason (Postgres => SQLite or vice versa).
• You want to keep regular backups of your data just in case something happens.
• You want to migrate from GoToSocial to a different Fediverse server, or from a different Fediverse server to GoToSocial.
• You're about to hack around on your instance and you want to make a quick backup so you don't lose everything if you mess up.

There are a few different ways of doing this, most of which require some technical knowledge.

Image your disk

If you're running GoToSocial on a VPS (a remote machine in the cloud), the easiest way to preserve all of your database entries and media is to ..........................................