Migrating, Updates, and Backups

As Paperless is still under active development, there’s a lot that can change as software updates roll out. You should backup often, so if anything goes wrong during an update, you at least have a means of restoring to something usable. Thankfully, there are automated ways of backing up, restoring, and updating the software.

Backing Up

So you’re bored of this whole project, or you want to make a remote backup of your files for whatever reason. This is easy to do, simply use the exporter to dump your documents and database out into an arbitrary directory.

Restoring

Restoring your data is just as easy, since nearly all of your data exists either in the file names, or in the contents of the files themselves. You just need to create an empty database (just follow the installation instructions again) and then import the tags.json file you created as part of your backup. Lastly, copy your exported documents into the consumption directory and start up the consumer.

$ cd /path/to/project
$ rm data/db.sqlite3  # Delete the database
$ cd src
$ ./manage.py migrate  # Create the database
$ ./manage.py createsuperuser
$ ./manage.py loaddata /path/to/arbitrary/place/tags.json
$ cp /path/to/exported/docs/* /path/to/consumption/dir/
$ ./manage.py document_consumer

Importing your data if you are using Docker is almost as simple:

# Stop and remove your current containers
$ docker-compose stop
$ docker-compose rm -f

# Recreate them, add the superuser
$ docker-compose up -d
$ docker-compose run --rm webserver createsuperuser

# Load the tags
$ cat /path/to/arbitrary/place/tags.json | docker-compose run --rm webserver loaddata_stdin -

# Load your exported documents into the consumption directory
# (How you do this highly depends on how you have set this up)
$ cp /path/to/exported/docs/* /path/to/mounted/consumption/dir/

After loading the documents into the consumption directory the consumer will immediately start consuming the documents.

Updates

For the most part, all you have to do to update Paperless is run git pull on the directory containing the project files, and then use Django’s migrate command to execute any database schema updates that might have been rolled in as part of the update:

$ cd /path/to/project
$ git pull
$ pip install -r requirements.txt
$ cd src
$ ./manage.py migrate

Note that it’s possible (even likely) that while git pull may update some files, the migrate step may not update anything. This is totally normal.

Additionally, as new features are added, the ability to control those features is typically added by way of an environment variable set in paperless.conf. You may want to take a look at the paperless.conf.example file to see if there’s anything new in there compared to what you’ve got in /etc.

If you are using Docker the update process is similar:

$ cd /path/to/project
$ git pull
$ docker build -t paperless .
$ docker-compose run --rm consumer migrate
$ docker-compose up -d

If git pull doesn’t report any changes, there is no need to continue with the remaining steps.