I'm trying to backup and restore a CouchDB following the official documentation:

I'm trying to backup and restore a CouchDB following the official documentation:

https://docs.couchdb.org/en/latest/maintenance/backups.html

"However, you can also copy the actual .couch files from the CouchDB data directory (by default, data/) at any time, without problem. CouchDB’s append-only storage format for both databases and secondary indexes ensures that this will work without issue."

Since the doc seems to not show clearly the steps to restore from files, i copy the entire data folder, build up a local CouchDB docker container and try to paste the files into container opt/couchdb/data folder.

But what i get when i start/restart the container and access localhost:5984 to see the databases, is: "This database failed to load."


What should i do after copy the files? Paste directly should work? What is the right time to paste? Should i create the DBs before?

Thank you all

_Originally posted by @defremont in https://github.com/apache/couchdb/discussions/3436_

Start with the backup and restore documentation at https://docs.couchdb.org/en/latest/maintenance/backups.html and compare its claims with the reported Docker data directory at /opt/couchdb/data. Determine the supported restore sequence, including when files should be copied and whether databases must already exist; done means the documentation gives clear, verified steps that avoid the reported load failure.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.