Backups and stability

[Dan Krol]

I was just thinking about how I've gotten the general (not Sandstorm related) advice to not back up postgres data by the files directly. Instead I should use a database dump tool, because this safely prevents race conditions (half-written records, etc). (Though, I would think that shutting down postgres should make copying files sufficiently safe as well.)

This got me thinking: How do Sandstorm backups work? Postgres, or really anything, could be in the middle of writing something when the user asks for a backup. Is this accounted for during backups? I would think one way of being safe would be to shut down the grain first whenever a backup is requested.

[Ian Denhardt]

Afaik we don't handle this at all right now; there's absolutely a risk
of database corruption due to race conditions. Shutting down the grain
should work, though we don't do that currently.

I opened an issue; I'd been aware of this but it looks like we didn't
have a ticket for it:

https://github.com/sandstorm-io/sandstorm/issues/3186

Quoting Dan Krol (2020-01-17 23:47:48)

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