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Restoring Backups

To restore your instance, you must have the files in your originals folder and a copy of the index database. We also recommend having a backup of the storage folder so that you don't need to recreate any thumbnail or sidecar files, and your backup includes the complete configuration:

  • if you have a backup copy of your storage and originals folders, the easiest way is to restore those folders first and then run the restore command in case you are using MariaDB
  • otherwise, you additionally need to perform a complete rescan of your library to recreate missing sidecar and thumbnail files
  • some of the metadata and your albums can also be recovered from YAML sidecar files even if you don't have a copy of the index database, unless you have disabled this feature

Restore Command

To restore the index from an existing MariaDB dump, you can run the following command:

docker compose exec photoprism photoprism restore -i -f

If you are using Podman on a Red Hat-compatible Linux distribution:

podman-compose exec photoprism photoprism restore -i -f

This will automatically search the backup folder for the most recent index dump and restore it. A custom backup base folder can be configured with PHOTOPRISM_BACKUP_PATH.

Omit the -f flag to prevent overwriting an existing index. As with the backup command, you can also specify a specific dump filename as an argument:

docker compose exec photoprism photoprism restore -i [filename]

When the database is restored, all user accounts and passwords are restored as well. If you have changed your password, you must thus use the old password to sign in.

Note that our examples use the new docker compose command by default. If your server does not yet support it, you can still use docker-compose or alternatively podman-compose on Red Hat-compatible distributions.