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Back up and restore overview

DETAILS: Tier: Free, Premium, Ultimate Offering: Self-managed

Your GitLab instance contains critical data for your software development or organization. It is important to have a disaster recovery plan that includes regular backups for:

  • Data protection: Safeguard against data loss due to hardware failures, software bugs, or accidental deletions.
  • Disaster recovery: Restore GitLab instances and data in case of adverse events.
  • Version control: Provide historical snapshots that enable rollbacks to previous states.
  • Compliance: Meet the regulatory requirements of specific industries.
  • Migration: Facilitate moving GitLab to new servers or environments.
  • Testing and development: Create copies for testing upgrades or new features without risk to production data.

NOTE: This documentation applies to GitLab Community and Enterprise Edition. While data security is ensured for GitLab.com, you can't use these methods to export or back up your data from GitLab.com.

Back up GitLab

The procedures to back up your GitLab instance vary based on your deployment's specific configuration and usage patterns. Factors such as data types, storage locations, and volume influence the backup method, storage options, and restoration process. For more information, see Back up GitLab.

Restore GitLab

The procedures to back up your GitLab instance vary based on your deployment's specific configuration and usage patterns. Factors such as data types, storage locations, and volume influence the restoration process.

For more information, see Restore GitLab.

Migrate to a new server

Use the GitLab backup and restore features to migrate your instance to a new server. For GitLab Geo deployments, consider Geo disaster recovery for planned failover. For more information, see Migrate to a new server.

Back up and restore large reference architectures

It is important to back up and restore large reference architectures regularly. For information on how to configure and restore backups for object storage data, PostgreSQL data, and Git repositories, see Back up and restore large reference architectures.

Backup archive process

For data preservation and system integrity, GitLab creates a backup archive. For detailed information on how GitLab creates this archive, see Backup archive process.

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