Questions about backups

[fflam]

Looking into properly backup my Jellyfin install, I came across this site. Jellyfin docs backup and restore Fairly straight forward, I run Jellyfin in a Debian LXC on Proxmox. so I just need to copy /var/lib/jellyfin and /etc/jellyfin. I noticed that contains the metadata folder, and for me that is currently over 50GB. as far as I can tell that folder just contains things like trickplay, posters, actor, and studio information. If i code to omit those files from the back up, if i have to restore it should be able to recreate/download all of that information again correct?  currently for me bandwidth is cheap, but physical storage is at a premium, so I'm looking for a way to reduce the size of my backups.

[laughing_man77]

This may help you. Here's a copy of my backup/restore scripts. It assumes you're using docker (you can comment out the docker compose lines if you want). I only bother backing up the config and ignore the movies (they are stored separately for me, anyway), but if you want that too, uncomment the declaration for data_dir and the second tar command.
Other than that, replace the values for version, data_dir and backup_dir. Then run

Code:

./backup.sh

backup.sh:

Code:

#! /bin/bash
sudo docker compose down
version="10.10.3"
config_dir="relative/path/to/jellyfin/config"
# data_dir="relative/path/to/jellyfin/data"
backup_dir="relative/path/to/backup"
timestamp=$(date +%Y.%m.%d.%H.%M.%S)
if [ -z "${backup_dir}" ]; then
        mkdir ${backup_dir}
fi
cd ${backup_dir}
tar -zcvf jellyfin.config.${timestamp}_${version}.tgz ../${config_dir}
# tar -zcvf jellyfin.data.${timestamp}_${version}.tgz ../${data_dir}
cd -
sudo docker compose up -d

This is the restore script. It makes a backup of the existing config in backup_dir, so that you can restore the old config if anyting goes wrong. Depending on the number of parent directories to you config directory, you may need to edit --strip-components=2 (which strips leading directories from the path when it untars the archive). I haven't bothered creating a restore for the data dir, but you could easily run that manually with 

Code:

tar zxvf relative/path/to/data_archive.tgz -C relative/path/to/data/dir --strip-components=2

Edit the config_dir and backup_dir values, then run the script with:

Code:

./restore.sh path/to/config_archive.tgz

restore.sh:

Code:

#! /bin/bash
sudo docker compose down
backup_file=$1
config_dir="relative/path/to/jellyfin/config"
backup_dir="relative/path/to/backup/old_config"
if [ -z "${backup_file}" ]; then
        echo "no backup file given."
        exit 1
fi
if [ ! -f "${backup_file}" ]; then
        echo "backup file ${backup_file} does not exist."
        exit 1
fi
echo "moving existing config to $backup_dir"
if [ ! -d ${backup_dir} ]; then
        mkdir -p ${backup_dir}
fi
rm -R ${backup_dir}/* ${backup_dir}/.*
sudo mv ${backup_dir}/* ${backup_dir}/
echo "Restoring config"
tar zxvf ${backup_file} -C ${config_dir} --strip-components=2
sudo docker compose up -d

[TheDreadPirate]

You could probably omit the entire /var/lib/jellyfin/metadata/library folder. That is the largest folder, by far, and is replaceable. Keeping everything else should maintain watch status, media identification, playlists, etc.

[fflam]

Sorry for the late reply, had something come up.

laughing_man77 Thank you for the scripts. I don't use Docker but I am sure they will help. My question was more what files HAVE to be backed up, not about the back up process. Thank you none the less.

You could probably omit the entire /var/lib/jellyfin/metadata/library folder. That is the largest folder, by far, and is replaceable. Keeping everything else should maintain watch status, media identification, playlists, etc.

I figured as much, it seems to be mostly the image files for the metadata and trickplay information. I just wanted to be sure before I went and messed something up. Really the most important thing is the users login/password. other things would be annoying to lose, but that would be a pain to set up again.

Thank you