How do I back up and restore my data?

[martinezsalmeron]

Backups are two Docker volumes and nothing else.

• pgdata — every record: patients, appointments, budgets, invoices.
• storage_data — uploaded files (STORAGE_BACKEND=local): images, signed budget PDFs, media.

A database dump on its own restores a clinic whose X-rays and signed PDFs are gone, so take both.

# Database
docker compose -f docker-compose.prod.yml exec -T db \
  pg_dump -U dental dental_clinic | gzip > dentalpin-$(date +%F).sql.gz

# Uploaded files
docker run --rm -v dentalpin_storage_data:/data -v "$PWD":/backup alpine \
  tar czf /backup/storage-$(date +%F).tar.gz -C /data .

Restore goes the other way, into a stack that is up with an empty database:

gunzip -c dentalpin-2026-07-28.sql.gz | \
  docker compose -f docker-compose.prod.yml exec -T db psql -U dental dental_clinic

Two things worth doing regardless of how you automate it:

1. Copy the dump off the server. A backup on the same disk as the database is not a backup.
2. Restore it somewhere once. An untested backup is a guess. Restoring into a throwaway stack takes ten minutes and is the only way to know.

The volume prefix (dentalpin_) comes from the directory name Compose runs in — check yours with docker volume ls.