Backups

The backup utility isn’t part of Tabbycat. Heroku provides a very good backup utility for all sites hosted on Heroku, and for Heroku-based Tabbycat sites, we strongly recommend it.

You should always back up the database before deleting any data while in the Edit Database area, because deleting data cannot be undone. It is also a good idea to back up the database before doing anything in the Edit Database area, unless you’re very familiar and confident with editing the Tabbycat database directly.

You may, as a matter of standard practice at large tournaments, wish to back up the database twice per round: Once just after you’ve generated the draw and allocated adjudicators, and once just after you’ve finished entering results.

Installations on Heroku

Heroku provides a utility to easily back up and restore the entire site database.

If you don’t have the Heroku CLI

You can capture backups from the Heroku Dashboard:

  1. Go to the Heroku Dashboard and click on your app.
  2. Under Installed add-ons, go to Heroku Postgres.
  3. Scroll down, and click on the Capture Backup button.

You can’t restore a backup without the Heroku Command Line Interface (CLI), so if you end up needing your backup, you’ll need to install the Heroku CLI, and then follow the instructions below.

If you have the Heroku CLI

The best guide to backing up databases is the Heroku Dev Center’s PGBackups guide.

To capture a backup:

$ heroku pg:backups:capture

To restore a backup:

$ heroku pg:backups:restore

If you have multiple Tabbycat sites, you’ll need to specify which one by adding --app mytournamentname to the end of the command.

Local installations

There are lots of ways to back up local PostgreSQL databases, but we’d suggest using the pg_dump and pg_restore commands.