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Forest Backups

"The condition of any backup is unknown until a restore is attempted." Everyone who deals with backups.

Manual backups​

The manual way requires knowledge of Forest internals and how it structures its data directory (which is not guaranteed to stay the same). Thus, it is recommended to use alternatives.

Backups with the forest-tool​

Forest comes with a forest-tool binary, which handles creating and recovering backups.

Basic usage​

⚠️ The Forest node should be offline during the backup process, especially when backing up the database

forest-tool backup create will create a backup file in the current working directory. It will contain the p2p key-pair used to derive the PeerId and the keystore. If storing anywhere, make sure to encrypt it.

forest-tool backup create

Sample output:

Adding /home/rumcajs/.local/share/forest/libp2p/keypair to backup
Adding /home/rumcajs/.local/share/forest/keystore.json to backup
Backup complete: forest-backup-2024-02-22_17-18-43.tar

Afterwards, you can use forest-tool backup restore <backup-file> to restore those files. Note that this assumes that Forest is using the default configuration - if it's not the case, provide the configuration TOML file via the --daemon-config parameter.

forest-tool backup restore forest-backup-2024-02-22_17-18-43.tar

Sample output:

Restoring /home/rumcajs/.local/share/forest/libp2p/keypair
Restoring /home/rumcajs/.local/share/forest/keystore.json
Restore complete

There are other flags to the backup tool, most notably --all, that will back up the entire Forest data directory. Note that this includes the whole blockstore, which, for mainnet, can reach hundreds of gigabytes. It is not recommended outside development.

CLI reference​

Details on the forest-tool backup command and its subcommands can be found at the CLI reference.