Backup and restore the database

Making a backup of CATMAID’s Postgres database as well as restoring it, is currently a manual process. Making backups can and should be automated through the operating system though. Also keep in mind that a certain database state is related to a certain source code version. This means after restoring a backup, a database migration might still be needed. To avoid this, reflecting the commit name in the backup name, might be a good idea. In most situations this shouldn’t be a concern though.

There are different ways of backing up CATMAID databases. Below three different options are shown that increase with complexity, but also come with additional benefits like less space requirements or point in time recovery (PITR). The first method is easy to set up and if nothing else, this should be set up as a basic backup strategy.

Modifying the database directly

To avoid database triggers firing during direct database modifications during a backup restore, it can be useful to disable database triggers. The following SQL can be used to disable triggers temporarily:

SET session_replication_role = replica;

/* Do your edits */

SET session_replication_role = DEFAULT;

Generally though, triggers are wanted and you should have a very good reason to disable them.

Backup of complete databases using pg_dump

To backup a CATMAID database (here named catmaid) execute:

pg_dump -Fc --clean -U <CATMAID-USER> catmaid -f "catmaid-`date +%Y%m%d%H%M`.gz.dump"

This produces a file that includes a time stamp in its name (note the backticks!) and that can be used to restore an entire CATMAID instance. The file itself uses a Postgres specific format to improve loading speed and restoration options.

To restore the dumped database into a database named catmaid (which would have to be created as described in the basic install instructions, including the database user referenced in the backup):

pg_restore -U <CATMAID-USER> -d catmaid catmaid_dump.sql

Both commands will ask for the password. Alternatively, you can use the scripts scripts/database/backup-database.py and scripts/database/revert-database.py, which do the same thing. Those don’t ask for a password, but require a .pgpass file (see PostgreSQL documentation).

Note that the pg_dump command above will not include any Postgres user information. Like explained in the installation instructions, this would have to be created first, before the pg_restore command is called. Alternatively, users and other global database objects can be backed up as well in a separate file:

sudo -u postgres pg_dumpall --globals-only | gzip -9 > "globals.gz.dump"

Which in turn could be restored in a completely new database like this:

zcat globals.gz.dump | sudo -u postgres psql

Afterwards the above pg_restore command can be executed without further action.

Excluding materialized views from backup

Some tables in CATMAID contain data that is procomputed from other tables. These “materialized views” can be omitted from backups and recreated after a backup restore. This reduces the size of backups, but increases the time to reload backups.

If e.g. -T treenode_edge is used with pg_dump, the treenode_edge table is not part of the backup. Without any -T option, all tables are exported and no additional steps are required after a restore.

The following tables can be ommitted from a backup (-T option with pg_dump), because they can be recreated after a backup is restored: treenode_edge, treenode_connector_edge, connector_geom, catmaid_stats_summary, node_query_cache, catmaid_skeleton_summary.

If one or more of these tables isn’t part of a backup, it is required to backup the schema separately by using pg_dump --schema-only. When restoring, the schema has to be restored first, because the tables not included in the backup need to be created regardless. This command is followed by a pg_restore --data-only --disable-triggers of the data dump.

If the -T option was used, the following command has to be executed additionally to complete the import:

manage.py catmaid_rebuild_edge_table

The script scripts/database/backup-min-database.sh can be used to export all databases without including the tables mention above. To restore such a backup, four steps are needed. Assuming the database name is catmaid (otherwise change the -d catmaid parameters), they are:

  1. Import the schema, which includes all tables. Make sure the relevant database user exists already, or use the “globals” export file. The target database name is part of the filename and matches the original database:

    $ sudo zcat catmaid.schema.gz.dump | sudo -u postgres psql -p 5432
    
  2. Import the data into the new database:

    $ sudo -u postgres pg_restore -p 5432 -d catmaid --data-only --disable-triggers \
    

    -S postgres –jobs=4 /path/to/backups/catmaid.all.gz.dump

  3. Analyze the database, for faster restoration of materialzied views:

    $ sudo -u postgres psql -p 5432 -d catmaid -c "\timing on" -c "ANALYZE;"
    
  4. Recreate all materializations:

    $ manage.py catmaid_rebuild_all_materializations
    

Automatic periodic backups

A cron job can be used to automate the backup process. Since this will be run as the root user, no password will be needed. The root user’s crontab file can be edited with:

sudo crontab -e

The actual crontab file is not meant to be edited directly, but only through the crontab tool. To run the above backup command every night at 3am, the following line would have to be added:

0 3 * * * sudo -u postgres pg_dump --clean catmaid -f "/opt/backup/psql/catmaid_$(date +\%Y\%m\%d\%H\%M).sql"

This creates a new file in the folder /opt/backup/psql at 3am every night. It will fail if the folder isn’t available or writable. The file name includes the date and time the command is run and will look like catmaid_201509101007.sql. Because cron treats % characters differently, they have to be escaped when calling date). The first five columns represent the date and time pattern when the command (sudo -u postgres ...) should be run. It consists of minute, hour, day of month, month and day of week with asterisks meaning any. For more information see the manual pages of cron and crontab. Because this command is run as root and the actual pg_dump call is executed as postgres user with the help of sudo, no database password is required. If your actual backup command gets more complicated than this, it is recommended to create a script file and call this from cron.