Backup and Restore

Full Backup / Restore

The best way to recover from data loss is to have a full backup of your machine. With this backup you can easily restore your machine to a working condition.

The procedure below explains how to selectively back up only the files essential to your MoinMoin installation. While there is no need to maintain both a full and a selective backup, having at least one of the two is strongly recommended.

Selective Backup

If you want a backup of MoinMoin and your data, then back up the following:

  • your data, usually everything under wiki/

  • Moin configuration, e.g., wikiconfig.py

  • logging configuration, e.g., logging.conf

  • Moin deployment script, e.g., moin.wsgi

  • web server configuration, e.g., Apache VirtualHost config

  • optional: Moin code + dependencies; you should at least know which version you ran, so you can reinstall that version when you need to restore

To create a dump of all data stored in MoinMoin (wiki items, user profiles), run the following command:

moin save --all-backends --file backup.moin

Please note that this file contains sensitive data like user profiles and wiki contents, so store your backups in a safe place that no unauthorized individual can access.

Backups require valid metadata to produce files that can be loaded; in particular, the size attribute must be correct for each revision. If bad metadata is found during the backup, a warning will be logged and it is recommended to run moin maint-validate-metadata --all-backends --fix. See Validate and Optionally Fix Metadata.

Selective Restore

To restore all software and configuration files to their original place, create an empty wiki first:

moin index-create

To load the backup file into your empty wiki, run:

moin load --file backup.moin

The index is removed and automatically recreated by the load command.