Advanced Backup Guide¶
At a minimum, a backup of PhotoPrism should include the files in your originals folder and a copy of the index database. We also recommend backing up the storage folder so that you don't need to recreate any thumbnail or sidecar files, and your backup includes the complete configuration.
The easiest way to create a full backup is to first run the backup command to generate a database dump as described in our Backup Guide. Then back up your originals and storage folders using any standard file backup utility.
Scheduled Backups¶
By default, PhotoPrism 240523-923ee0cf7 and newer versions automatically create daily database backups for you, with up to 3 copies being retained. The schedule, the type of backups, and the number of backups to be retained can be changed in the configuration.
Backup Command¶
You can run the following command in a terminal to manually create a new MariaDB or SQLite database backup:
photoprism backup -i [filename]
Or the following if you are using docker-compose:
docker compose exec -T photoprism photoprism backup -i - > photoprism-db.sql
As seen above, you can use - as filename to write the backup to stdout.
This is done to ensure the backup resides outside of the container environment.
If you leave the filename empty, the backup will be written to the default backup folder configured via PHOTOPRISM_BACKUP_PATH.
If you want, you can also export your cache and thumbnails, but it can also be re-generated after restore. It will save you from re-generating thumbnails from scratch however.
Helpful information can be found on GitHub as well.
Restore Command¶
See our regular Backup Guide to learn how to restore backups.
SQLite Backups¶
If you are using a current version, you can create SQL dumps of SQLite with the photoprism backup command. Since the binary SQLite database files are located in the storage folder, they should also be automatically included in any backup.
In order to create a dump directly with SQLite, you can alternatively run this command:
docker compose exec -T photoprism sqlite3 /photoprism/storage/index.db .dump > photoprism-db.sql
With pure docker, you can run the following (or replace docker with podman on Red Hat-based Linux distributions):
docker exec -t PhotoPrism sqlite3 /photoprism/storage/index.db .dump > photoprism-db.sql
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