documentation/docs/db-migration-backup-manual.md
2025-12-13 00:38:45 -03:00

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Database backup and migration for manual installations

This guide is divided into 4 sections:

Checking if you have free space to make a backup

Doing a backup can take large portions of your storage if you have limited resources (like running Invidious in a VPS), therefore you should check how many free space you have in the server you are running Invidious on.

Follow this steps to check the size of your database:

1) Stop Invidious
$ docker compose down
2) Check the size of the database
$ sudo -i -u postgres
$ psql
# Write `SELECT pg_size_pretty(pg_database_size('invidious'));`
# into the psql interactive terminal
postgres=# SELECT pg_size_pretty(pg_database_size('invidious'));

And you will get:

 pg_size_pretty
----------------
  2 GB

In this example, 2 GB is the size the database.

If you system has less free space than the value that you got, you should free some space before making a backup.

You can skip this step if you have enough free space.

Invidious caches video information so it can be later reused to display video information, this is stored in the videos table and all the rows can be safely deleted to free up some space when doing the backup.

1) Stop invidious
$ sudo systemctl stop invidious.service
2) Delete the video cache
$ sudo -i -u postgres
$ psql -d invidious
# Write `TRUNCATE TABLE videos;`
# into the psql interactive terminal
invidious=# TRUNCATE TABLE videos;
# Exit the psql interactive terminal with the Ctrl+D keybind.

Doing a backup

After you checked if you really have free space to make a backup, let's do a backup!

1) Stop Invidious
$ sudo systemctl stop invidious.service
2) Dump the Invidious database
$ sudo -i -u postgres
$ pg_dump invidious > dump.sql

And done, if your Invidious database is big, it may take a while to finish the pg_dump process.

Your backup will be saved in the current directory where the command was executed as dump.sql which you can later delete if everything went fine when migrating your database.

Migrating your Database

Manual installation

Go to the directory where your Invidious installation is and follow this steps:

1) Go to the Invidious installation folder
$ sudo su - invidious
$ cd invidious
2) Migrate database
$ ./invidious --migrate

And done, your Invidious instance should now be migrated to the latest database version. If anything goes wrong, you can always restore your data reading the Database restore for Docker Compose installations guide.