How to backup your databases

Database dump hooks

If you want to backup a database, it's best practice with most database systems to backup an exported database dump, rather than backing up your database's internal file storage. That's because the internal storage can change while you're reading from it. In contrast, a database dump creates a consistent snapshot that is more suited for backups.

Fortunately, borgmatic includes built-in support for creating database dumps prior to running backups. For example, here is everything you need to dump and backup a couple of local PostgreSQL databases and a MySQL database.

postgresql_databases:
    - name: users
    - name: orders
mysql_databases:
    - name: posts

Prior to version 1.8.0 Put these and other database options in the hooks: section of your configuration.

New in version 1.5.22 You can also dump MongoDB databases. For example:

mongodb_databases:
    - name: messages

New in version 1.7.9 Additionally, you can dump SQLite databases. For example:

sqlite_databases:
    - name: mydb
      path: /var/lib/sqlite3/mydb.sqlite

New in version 1.8.2 If you're using MariaDB, use the MariaDB database hook instead of mysql_databases: as the MariaDB hook calls native MariaDB commands instead of the deprecated MySQL ones. For instance:

mariadb_databases:
    - name: comments

As part of each backup, borgmatic streams a database dump for each configured database directly to Borg, so it's included in the backup without consuming additional disk space. (The exceptions are the PostgreSQL/MongoDB "directory" dump formats, which can't stream and therefore do consume temporary disk space. Additionally, prior to borgmatic 1.5.3, all database dumps consumed temporary disk space.)

To support this, borgmatic creates temporary named pipes in ~/.borgmatic by default. To customize this path, set the borgmatic_source_directory option in borgmatic's configuration.

Also note that using a database hook implicitly enables both the read_special and one_file_system configuration settings (even if they're disabled in your configuration) to support this dump and restore streaming. See Limitations below for more on this.

Here's a more involved example that connects to remote databases:

postgresql_databases:
    - name: users
      hostname: database1.example.org
    - name: orders
      hostname: database2.example.org
      port: 5433
      username: postgres
      password: trustsome1
      format: tar
      options: "--role=someone"
mariadb_databases:
    - name: photos
      hostname: database3.example.org
      port: 3307
      username: root
      password: trustsome1
      options: "--skip-comments"
mysql_databases:
    - name: posts
      hostname: database4.example.org
      port: 3307
      username: root
      password: trustsome1
      options: "--skip-comments"
mongodb_databases:
    - name: messages
      hostname: database5.example.org
      port: 27018
      username: dbuser
      password: trustsome1
      authentication_database: mongousers
      options: "--ssl"
sqlite_databases:
    - name: mydb
      path: /var/lib/sqlite3/mydb.sqlite

See your borgmatic configuration file for additional customization of the options passed to database commands (when listing databases, restoring databases, etc.).

All databases

If you want to dump all databases on a host, use all for the database name:

postgresql_databases:
    - name: all
mariadb_databases:
    - name: all
mysql_databases:
    - name: all
mongodb_databases:
    - name: all

Note that you may need to use a username of the postgres superuser for this to work with PostgreSQL.

The SQLite hook in particular does not consider "all" a special database name.

Prior to version 1.8.0 Put these options in the hooks: section of your configuration.

New in version 1.7.6 With PostgreSQL, MariaDB, and MySQL, you can optionally dump "all" databases to separate files instead of one combined dump file, allowing more convenient restores of individual databases. Enable this by specifying your desired database dump format:

postgresql_databases:
    - name: all
      format: custom
mariadb_databases:
    - name: all
      format: sql
mysql_databases:
    - name: all
      format: sql

Containers

If your database is running within a container and borgmatic is too, no problem—configure borgmatic to connect to the container's name on its exposed port. For instance:

postgresql_databases:
    - name: users
      hostname: your-database-container-name
      port: 5433
      username: postgres
      password: trustsome1

Prior to version 1.8.0 Put these options in the hooks: section of your configuration.

But what if borgmatic is running on the host? You can still connect to a database container if its ports are properly exposed to the host. For instance, when running the database container, you can specify --publish 127.0.0.1:5433:5432 so that it exposes the container's port 5432 to port 5433 on the host (only reachable on localhost, in this case). Or the same thing with Docker Compose:

services:
   your-database-container-name:
       image: postgres
       ports:
           - 127.0.0.1:5433:5432

And then you can connect to the database from borgmatic running on the host:

hooks:
    postgresql_databases:
        - name: users
          hostname: 127.0.0.1
          port: 5433
          username: postgres
          password: trustsome1

Alter the ports in these examples to suit your particular database system.

Normally, borgmatic dumps a database by running a database dump command (e.g. pg_dump) on the host or wherever borgmatic is running, and this command connects to your containerized database via the given hostname and port. But if you don't have any database dump commands installed on your host and you'd rather use the commands inside your database container itself, borgmatic supports that too. Just configure borgmatic to exec into your container to run the dump command.

For instance, if using Docker and PostgreSQL, something like this might work:

hooks:
    postgresql_databases:
        - name: users
          hostname: 127.0.0.1
          port: 5433
          username: postgres
          password: trustsome1
          pg_dump_command: docker exec my_pg_container pg_dump

... where my_pg_container is the name of your database container. In this example, you'd also need to set the pg_restore_command and psql_command options.

Similar command override options are available for (some of) the other supported database types as well. See the configuration reference for details.

No source directories

New in version 1.7.1 If you would like to backup databases only and not source directories, you can omit source_directories entirely.

Prior to version 1.7.1 In older versions of borgmatic, instead specify an empty source_directories value, as it is a mandatory option there:

location:
    source_directories: []

hooks:
    mysql_databases:
        - name: all

External passwords

If you don't want to keep your database passwords in your borgmatic configuration file, you can instead pass them in via environment variables or command-line configuration overrides.

Configuration backups

An important note about this database configuration: You'll need the configuration to be present in order for borgmatic to restore a database. So to prepare for this situation, it's a good idea to include borgmatic's own configuration files as part of your regular backups. That way, you can always bring back any missing configuration files in order to restore a database.

New in version 1.7.15 borgmatic automatically includes configuration files in your backup. See the documentation on the config bootstrap action for more information.

Supported databases

As of now, borgmatic supports PostgreSQL, MariaDB, MySQL, MongoDB, and SQLite databases directly. But see below about general-purpose preparation and cleanup hooks as a work-around with other database systems. Also, please file a ticket for additional database systems that you'd like supported.

Database restoration

When you want to replace an existing database with its backed-up contents, you can restore it with borgmatic. Note that the database must already exist; borgmatic does not currently create a database upon restore.

To restore a database dump from an archive, use the borgmatic restore action. But the first step is to figure out which archive to restore from. A good way to do that is to use the rlist action:

borgmatic rlist

(No borgmatic rlist action? Try list instead or upgrade borgmatic!)

That should yield output looking something like:

host-2023-01-01T04:05:06.070809      Tue, 2023-01-01 04:05:06 [...]
host-2023-01-02T04:06:07.080910      Wed, 2023-01-02 04:06:07 [...]

Assuming that you want to restore all database dumps from the archive with the most up-to-date files and therefore the latest timestamp, run a command like:

borgmatic restore --archive host-2023-01-02T04:06:07.080910

(No borgmatic restore action? Upgrade borgmatic!)

With newer versions of borgmatic, you can simplify this to:

borgmatic restore --archive latest

The --archive value is the name of the archive to restore from. This restores all databases dumps that borgmatic originally backed up to that archive.

This is a destructive action! borgmatic restore replaces live databases by restoring dumps from the selected archive. So be very careful when and where you run it.

Repository selection

If you have a single repository in your borgmatic configuration file(s), no problem: the restore action figures out which repository to use.

But if you have multiple repositories configured, then you'll need to specify the repository to use via the --repository flag. This can be done either with the repository's path or its label as configured in your borgmatic configuration file.

borgmatic restore --repository repo.borg --archive host-2023-...

Restore particular databases

If you've backed up multiple databases into an archive, and you'd only like to restore one of them, use the --database flag to select one or more databases. For instance:

borgmatic restore --archive host-2023-... --database users --database orders

New in version 1.7.6 You can also restore individual databases even if you dumped them as "all"—as long as you dumped them into separate files via use of the "format" option. See above for more information.

Restore all databases

To restore all databases:

borgmatic restore --archive host-2023-... --database all

Or omit the --database flag entirely:

borgmatic restore --archive host-2023-...

Prior to borgmatic version 1.7.6, this restores a combined "all" database dump from the archive.

New in version 1.7.6 Restoring "all" databases restores each database found in the selected archive. That includes any combined dump file named "all" and any other individual database dumps found in the archive.

Restore particular schemas

New in version 1.7.13 With PostgreSQL and MongoDB, you can limit the restore to a single schema found within the database dump:

borgmatic restore --archive latest --database users --schema tentant1

Restore to an alternate host

New in version 1.7.15 A database dump can be restored to a host other than the one from which it was originally dumped. The connection parameters like the username, password, and port can also be changed. This can be done from the command line:

borgmatic restore --archive latest --database users --hostname database2.example.org --port 5433 --username postgres --password trustsome1

Or from the configuration file:

postgresql_databases:
    - name: users
        hostname: database1.example.org
        restore_hostname: database1.example.org
        restore_port: 5433
        restore_username: postgres
        restore_password: trustsome1

Limitations

There are a few important limitations with borgmatic's current database restoration feature that you should know about:

1. You must restore as the same Unix user that created the archive containing the database dump. That's because the user's home directory path is encoded into the path of the database dump within the archive.
2. As mentioned above, borgmatic can only restore a database that's defined in borgmatic's own configuration file. So include your configuration file in backups to avoid getting caught without a way to restore a database.
3. borgmatic does not currently support backing up or restoring multiple databases that share the exact same name on different hosts.
4. Because database hooks implicitly enable the read_special option, any special files are excluded from backups (named pipes, block devices, character devices, and sockets) to prevent hanging. Try a command like find /your/source/path -type b -or -type c -or -type p -or -type s to find such files. Common directories to exclude are /dev and /run, but that may not be exhaustive. New in version 1.7.3 When database hooks are enabled, borgmatic automatically excludes special files (and symlinks to special files) that may cause Borg to hang, so generally you no longer need to manually exclude them. There are potential edge cases though in which applications on your system create new special files after borgmatic constructs its exclude list, resulting in Borg hangs. If that occurs, you can resort to the manual excludes described above. And to opt out of the auto-exclude feature entirely, explicitly set read_special to true.
5. Database hooks also implicitly enable the one_file_system option, which means Borg won't cross filesystem boundaries when looking for files to backup. This is especially important when running borgmatic in a container, as container volumes are mounted as separate filesystems. One work-around is to explicitly add each mounted volume you'd like to backup to source_directories instead of relying on Borg to include them implicitly via a parent directory.

Manual restoration

If you prefer to restore a database without the help of borgmatic, first extract an archive containing a database dump.

borgmatic extracts the dump file into the username/.borgmatic/ directory within the extraction destination path, where username is the user that created the backup. For example, if you created the backup with the root user and you're extracting to /tmp, then the dump will be in /tmp/root/.borgmatic.

After extraction, you can manually restore the dump file using native database commands like pg_restore, mysql, mongorestore, sqlite, or similar.

Also see the documentation on listing database dumps.

Preparation and cleanup hooks

If this database integration is too limited for needs, borgmatic also supports general-purpose preparation and cleanup hooks. These hooks allows you to trigger arbitrary commands or scripts before and after backups. So if necessary, you can use these hooks to create database dumps with any database system.

Troubleshooting

Authentication errors

With PostgreSQL, MariaDB, and MySQL, if you're getting authentication errors when borgmatic tries to connect to your database, a natural reaction is to increase your borgmatic verbosity with --verbosity 2 and go looking in the logs. You'll notice though that your database password does not show up in the logs. This is likely not the cause of the authentication problem unless you mistyped your password, however; borgmatic passes your password to the database via an environment variable that does not appear in the logs.

The cause of an authentication error is often on the database side—in the configuration of which users are allowed to connect and how they are authenticated. For instance, with PostgreSQL, check your pg_hba.conf file for that configuration.

Additionally, MariaDB or MySQL may be picking up some of your credentials from a defaults file like ~/mariadb.cnf or ~/.my.cnf. If that's the case, then it's possible MariaDB or MySQL end up using, say, a username from borgmatic's configuration and a password from ~/mariadb.cnf or ~/.my.cnf. This may result in authentication errors if this combination of credentials is not what you intend.

MariaDB or MySQL table lock errors

If you encounter table lock errors during a database dump with MariaDB or MySQL, you may need to use a transaction. You can add any additional flags to the options: in your database configuration. Here's an example with MariaDB:

mariadb_databases:
    - name: posts
      options: "--single-transaction --quick"

borgmatic hangs during backup

See Limitations above about read_special. You may need to exclude certain paths with named pipes, block devices, character devices, or sockets on which borgmatic is hanging.

Alternatively, if excluding special files is too onerous, you can create two separate borgmatic configuration files—one for your source files and a separate one for backing up databases. That way, the database read_special option will not be active when backing up special files.

New in version 1.7.3 See Limitations above about borgmatic's automatic exclusion of special files to prevent Borg hangs.

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