Any suggestion on how to move to a new VPS?

Hello again! I believe I responded to you about this on Lemmy!

Migration isn't really supported by this project, but for the benefit of you and everyone else, I can share some guidance with you here.

Basically, your data is stored in Docker volumes which are not present in that live folder. So, moving the live folder will not be enough. You will need to copy the Docker volumes, too.

In their infinite wisdom, Docker still does not have a great way to do this. You have some options though:

https://github.com/loomchild/volume-backup

https://github.com/BretFisher/docker-vackup

You can get a list of volumes you need to back up on your current instance with docker volume ls. The important ones will be prefixed with lemmy-easy-deploy_

NOTE: You will have to manually set the labels on the new volume when migrating it. The first repo I linked has some guidance on how to do that. You can run this on your current server to see which labels you will need (this is just one example, but all the volumes will have similar labels):

docker volume inspect lemmy-easy-deploy_postgres_data

The ones you need are in that Labels object. Here is an example output from mine:

        "Labels": {
            "com.docker.compose.project": "lemmy-easy-deploy",
            "com.docker.compose.version": "2.18.1",
            "com.docker.compose.volume": "postgres_data"
        },

Notice the pattern there - com.docker.compose.project will always be lemmy-easy-deploy, and com.docker.compose.volume will always be "whatever the volume is called in docker-compose.yml," so postgres_data in this case. All lemmy-easy-deploy_ volumes will have similar labels, don't forget about those.

If you are worried about messing that up, don't worry. As long as the names of the volumes are the same, Lemmy Easy Deploy should pick them up. It's just, if you don't set these labels properly, Docker Compose will print warnings.

If you've got your volumes set up, and docker volume ls on the new system looks just like the old system (as in, all the volume names are identical), you should be good to run ./deploy.sh -f to redeploy.

So to summarize:

Recursively copy your ENTIRE Lemmy-Easy-Deploy folder, including the live folder and everything in it.
Use a Docker volume backup utility to export all your volumes to a file.
Transfer those files to your new server.
Follow the guidance in this section, particularly number 9, to create the correct labels before you restore the data into the volumes.
Restore the data into the volumes.
Go to the Lemmy-Easy-Deploy folder and run ./deploy.sh -f. If all goes well, your instance should boot up with all your old settings and data.

Good luck!

ubergeek77 / Lemmy-Easy-Deploy

Any suggestion on how to move to a new VPS? #7