Backup and restore Docker volumes

If you are using named volumes in Docker, sometimes you might want to perform backups of those volumes and restore said backups. It might be for the safety of your data or to move your containers to another host machine.

Uncompressed

In a general sense, here is the command you need to run to perform an uncompressed backup:

$ docker run --rm --volumes-from container_name \
  -v $(pwd):/backup busybox \
  tar -cvf /backup/backup.tar /path/to/backup

Explanation:

• start a busybox container (busybox is a lightweight Linux image with some useful tooling)
• --rm – remove container after it exits
• --volumes-from container_name – mounts the volumes used by the container named container_name inside the busybox container
• -v $(pwd):/backup – mounts the current path on the host as a /backup folder in the busybox container
• execute a tar command that packages /path/to/backup to a backup.tar file in the current directory

To restore the uncompressed backup:

$ docker run --rm --volumes-from container_name \
  -v $(pwd):/backup busybox \
  tar -xvf /backup/backup.tar -C /

Compressed

Here is the command to perform a compressed backup:

$ docker run --rm --volumes-from container_name \
  -v $(pwd):/backup busybox \
  tar -czvf /backup/backup.tar.gz /path/to/backup

To restore the compressed backup:

$ docker run --rm --volumes-from container_name \
  -v $(pwd):/backup busybox \
  tar -xzvf /backup/backup.tar.gz -C /

An example

Ok, now let’s take a look at an example. I will backup and restore the volumes of my nginx-proxy container. The container has 2 volumes, mounted at /data and /etc/letsencrypt.

Backup:

$ docker run --rm --volumes-from nginx-proxy \
  -v $(pwd):/backup busybox \
  tar -cvf /backup/nginx-data.tar /data
$ docker run --rm --volumes-from nginx-proxy \
  -v $(pwd):/backup busybox \
  tar -cvf /backup/letsencrypt-data.tar /etc/letsencrypt

Restore:

$ docker run --rm --volumes-from nginx-proxy \
  -v $(pwd):/backup busybox \
  tar -xvf /backup/nginx-data.tar -C /
$ docker run --rm --volumes-from nginx-proxy \
  -v $(pwd):/backup busybox \
  tar -xvf /backup/letsencrypt-data.tar -C /

Hope this helps, have fun clickity-clacking.