Include updater-xxxxxxxxxx/backups in backup?

ℹ️ Support
,
1

I have no support/technical question and have seen the support category. (Be aware that direct support questions will be deleted.)

on

Which general topic do you have

Hi!

I’m backup up my Nextcloud instance with borg. I saw that I have a subfolder updater-xxxxxxxxxx/backups in my data folder.
Would you include this one in backups?

Thanks,
Julius

2

These backups are created during Nextcloud updates.

Screenshot

Fifth point: “Create backup”

updater-6-maintenance-mode
updater-6-maintenance-mode2700×1946 159 KB

My personal opinion: I would not backup this again. You only need this if something goes wrong immediately during the update.

1 Like
3

I always delete this folder when the update was successful.

4

Out of curiosity:

Does the folder have larger contents?

I have two folders in it

  1. backups → empty
  2. downloads > empty

and a file 25 bytes in size called “.step-previous-update”

5

Hi Julius!

It’s generally a good idea to include the updater-xxxxxxxxxx/backups folder in your Nextcloud backups. It contains important update-related backup files that can help recover your instance if an update goes wrong. However, these files can be large and might not always be necessary if you have full backups of your entire Nextcloud data and config.

If you want to save space and already have comprehensive backups, you could exclude it, but including it adds an extra safety net. Hope this helps!

6

In my case:

  • the updater-*/backups contains the backup of the last 3 updates. In this case, backup means a copy of the installation files and apps, no data or DB dumps. So 3x ~900MB.
  • updater-*/downloads is maybe for the installfile, which is downloaded during update.

I backup the server once a day. If I now install an update in the afternoon at 3 pm which fails during the installation, then the backups of the backups are not in the backup anyway.

I simply consider this as Nextcloud’s own safety net in case something goes wrong during the update that becomes apparent immediately after the update.