The instance's own backup
Cubeship's own database — every account, project, app, credential and attachment — plus the two files that cannot be worked out again, on the same schedule machinery.
The most valuable database on the box is Cubeship's own Postgres, which holds every user, project, app, credential and attachment and is not a datastore at all. Settings → Backups backs it up the way a database's tab does: a schedule, a destination, a retention, and Back up now.
What the archive holds
A gzipped tar with three things in it:
| Entry | What it is |
|---|---|
cubeship.sql | a plain-SQL pg_dump of the instance's database |
letsencrypt/acme.json | every certificate the instance holds, with its private keys |
projects/ | the pictures chosen for projects |
The certificate store is in because losing it is not fatal — the proxy
asks again — but asking again spends a weekly allowance Let's Encrypt
shares across everyone under the same registered domain, and on a
default install that domain is sslip.io.
What is deliberately out
The data. A datastore's directory and a managed store's objects are the two largest things on the box by orders of magnitude, and each has a backup of its own that can go somewhere else. Folding them in would make the one artifact that has to be small enough to take every night the one that is too big to take at all. The build cache is a cache, the setup token is spent, and the proxy's routes are written from the rows on every start.
Retention counts within a kind
The instance's dumps and a database's are two windows: a nightly copy of the instance never pushes somebody's database out of its own seven.
An instance on somebody else's database
An instance started with CUBESHIP_DATABASE_URL pointing at a Postgres
it does not run has no container to dump through, and is refused with
that sentence — back that server up where it lives.
There is no restore button
The thing it would replace is the database the button runs on. Putting an instance back is an operator's procedure, and the screen says so where the button would be: Putting an instance back.