@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.