I’ve recently been looking into ways to properly back up the apps I have installed through the TrueNAS Scale UI. I already have backups in place for all the data that my apps need and consume. Now I’d like to properly back up their configurations. I read somewhere that all app configurations are stored in the /mnt/.ix-apps/app_configs folder. Backing this up is trivial. However, it is the restoration process that scares me.
To put it simply:
Assume I have a backup of /mnt/.ix-apps/app_configs.
Now, let’s say my system dies.
What is the proper way to restore everything I backed up from /mnt/.ix-apps/app_configs?
ChatGPT seems to think I can just stop the middlewared service, copy all the backed up files to their original locations, and then restart middlewared. Would that work? Or would I have to reinstall each app from the UI manually and hand pick all the values saved in the backed up configurations?
Now, I do know that there exists Dockge which lets me have more control over the docker composeness of my system. But, for theory’s sake, let’s assume I am stuck with installing/configuring apps through the TrueNAS Scale UI.
Lo-Fi way would be to screen shot the app ui config for each app. Depending on the app, some have automatic config/data backup features. Plex and the Arrs do. I just add an extra hostpath mounts for those in-container folders. Then push them to google drive.
Well, as I mentioned in my original post, I am already backing up basically everything I can when it comes to the data and internal configurations for each app. That part I’m not worried about. It’s more like, if I were to reinstall TrueNAS Scale from scratch, is there not a faster way to restore all my apps to how they were before without installing each one individually and manually copying over all the configs into the UI? It surprises me that there isn’t an offically supported way to fully restore all my apps from a single backup
All the community/official repo apps are all templated, so no. All the files exist in /mnt/.ix-apps but not 100% sure how middleware handles app deployment to create those files.
You might want to look into moving to your own custom compose apps. Then keep those yaml files somewhere, like github. That’s what I’ve done.
