@jsalvador First, let me say I haven't looked at the mastodon code, so I don't know much about it. But in general, the migrations are instructions to the database to set up the tables the way the application wants them. The users will then fill in those tables with their user information, toots, etc. That's the stuff you want to back up - the migrations let you rebuild an empty database at any time, but the data is what's important.

@Kryten Reading the Mastodon's docs, I've found another solution, but I don't like it... Dumping the database with pghero (implemented at docker container, I guess).

So I need to backup both: migrations and dump files. Anyway, thanks for your help! It was very useful!

@jsalvador Now, depending on the database server used by mastodon and how they're configured, the database can be stored in several different places. One common database is MySQL. The actual data is (usually) stored in /var/lib/mysql and (in some cases) can be backed up just by copying those files. With MySQL you could also use the mysqldump command to save all the data in an SQL file. So, it's a bit more of a project than I can explain in 500 characters...

@Kryten Don't worry. I have a lot of experience with MySQL databases, but not with Docker, PostgreSQL or Redis. The concepts are extrapolable.

@jsalvador Good. The only trick with Docker is finding the files. They're actually stored in your host file system, but they can be tricky to find. The "docker cp" command lets you copy files to/from an existing container.