Backups & restore

A self-hosted instance keeps state in a few stores: Postgres for application data, ClickHouse for the observability records (spans and traces), and MinIO for object storage. Redis is a cache (sessions, locks, rate limits, pub/sub), so it rebuilds on its own and doesn’t need a backup. RabbitMQ holds the task queue: losing it drops in-flight background jobs, so drain it before planned downtime rather than backing it up.

Postgres

Postgres holds the application data, so back it up on a schedule. Use the custom format, and pass -T so docker compose exec doesn’t allocate a TTY and mangle the binary dump:

# Backup
docker compose exec -T postgres \
  pg_dump -U futureagi -d futureagi --format=custom \
  > backup-$(date +%F).dump

# Restore
docker compose exec -T postgres \
  pg_restore -U futureagi -d futureagi --clean --if-exists \
  < backup-2026-04-22.dump

The named volumes that hold state. The compose project name is futureagi, so every volume is prefixed futureagi_:

Volume	Holds
futureagi_postgres-data	Postgres application data
futureagi_clickhouse-data	ClickHouse spans and traces
futureagi_minio-data	MinIO objects
futureagi_rabbitmq-data	RabbitMQ task queue
futureagi_redis-data	Redis cache (rebuildable)
futureagi_peerdb-catalog-data	PeerDB replication catalog
futureagi_peerdb-minio-data	PeerDB staging objects
futureagi_fi-collector-data	fi-collector buffer

ClickHouse

ClickHouse is not just a replica anymore. Since the CH25 cutover (CH25_DROP_LEGACY_CDC_CHAIN defaults to true), the fi-collector writes spans straight to ClickHouse and Django dual-writes traces. PeerDB only rebuilds the tables it mirrors from Postgres, so if you lose ClickHouse the observability data does not come back from a PeerDB re-init. Back it up on its own:

BACKUP DATABASE default TO S3('s3://your-bucket/ch-backup/', 'KEY', 'SECRET');

MinIO

Mirror the MinIO bucket to S3 with the MinIO client:

mc alias set local http://localhost:9005 futureagi <MINIO_ROOT_PASSWORD>
mc alias set s3 https://s3.amazonaws.com <AWS_KEY> <AWS_SECRET>
mc mirror local/ s3/your-bucket/

If you’ve already moved to managed data stores, your provider’s own backup tooling replaces these commands.

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