Overview

Diskette archive

Diskette use a tarball archive (*.tar.gz) to gather application model data dumps and media storage directories to archive and to restore.

A diskette archive contains a manifest file that is used to know what is to restore and how but you will not need to manipulate it.

Depending options, the archive can contains data dumps, storage directories or both. An archive can not be created without anything.

When creating an archive, remember you will need twice size of storages size then also the size of data dumps.

Note

Diskette data dump are done to work on the same project. It could work with another project but it will need to be compatible, it means migration states should be identical, project must enable the same applications and have compatible settings.

Application model datas

They are managed through Django fixtures in JSON format.

Fixtures have benefit to be naturally managed from Django and are not tied to any SGBD dump format, so you can import them with any supported database driver from Django.

Note

Fixture format is not as efficient as SGBD dump formats, especially on very large datasets. It may not be the best choices to backup very big databases.

Diskette dumps data with Django command dumpdata and load them with loaddata. However application definition can define another dump command to use but it must be a Django command.

Diskette knows model datas to dump from Application definition list defined in settings.DISKETTE_APPS.

Media storages

Despite their name, this is not related to Django storages. A storage is just a directory to archive. Commonly the simpliest configuration will just define a storage for the media directory and possibly another one for the protected medias (when you have some protections with sendfile).

To avoid invalid storage configuration that would lead to write anywhere on the user system, all storage directories must be a children of a storage basepath which is commonly the current working directory. You can tweak the configuration to bypass this protection but it is rarely a good idea.

Diskette knows storages to archive from list defined in settings.DISKETTE_STORAGES.