Docs: the backups page lists cache/ as data to back up - on a fresh instance it is 99.9% of the backup
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Description
Environment
- Open WebUI v0.11.1,
ghcr.io/open-webui/open-webui:v0.11.1, Docker, default SQLite,
volume on/app/backend/data. - Following https://docs.openwebui.com/tutorials/maintenance/backups.
What I did
Started a fresh instance, signed up one account, saved one chat, stopped the stack as
the page's scripts do, and copied /app/backend/data.
What I observed
1.1G data
0 data/uploads
32K data/webui.db-shm
160K data/webui.db-wal
184K data/vector_db
632K data/webui.db
1.1G data/cache
cache/ is a Hugging Face hub tree - all-MiniLM-L6-v2 and faster-whisper-base -
downloaded on first start. The page lists cache/ among the five things the data store
contains, next to webui.db and uploads/, with no note that it is regenerable. A
person following the page keeps 1.1 GB per snapshot for what is, at that moment, about
a megabyte of their own data.
Two smaller things from the same run, in case they are useful:
-
The cache contains symlinks - 46 of them in my copy, from
snapshots/into
blobs/. Any restore path that cannot create symlinks (a different operating system,
a filesystem without them, some archive tooling) will not reproduce the tree. Excluding
cache/makes this go away as well. -
There is no restore procedure on the page. It covers taking the backup
thoroughly and stops there. A person restoring for the first time is doing it on the
worst day they have had this year, and the two things they need to be told are the
order of operations and thatwebui.db-walhas to travel withwebui.db- on my
instance the-walwas 160 KiB against a 632 KiB database, so a copy of the.db
alone would be missing the newest writes.
Suggested change
On the existing page, next to the list of five:
cache/holds embedding and speech models that Open WebUI downloads on demand. It is
safe to exclude from backups - it will be re-downloaded - and on a fresh instance it is
already larger than everything else in this directory put together.
and a short Restoring section:
Stop the stack, replace
/app/backend/datawith the backup, and start it again. If
you copied files individually rather than the whole directory, make sure
webui.db-walcame withwebui.db.
I would be glad to send a docs PR with both if that would be welcome. The backups page
is already one of the better ones in self-hosted software - it is the only project in a
set I have been testing that has a page about backups at all.
Everything above, with the commands and the unedited output, is at https://github.com/spelingbee/drillback/tree/main/docs/drill/open-webui - one leg of a restore drill across fifteen self-hosted applications, each one following its own backup documentation as written.
Contributor guide
First steps
- Read the whole issue, then the project's contributing guide.
- Comment on the issue to say you are picking it up — it saves two people doing the same work.
- Fork the repository and make your change on a branch.
- Open a pull request that references the issue number.
Research direction
Open the existing maintenance/backups page referenced in the issue and review its current list of data-store contents and backup steps. Document that cache/ is regenerable, add the requested restoring section, and verify that the resulting instructions cover the full data directory and webui.db-wal.
Written by the indexing model from the issue text.
Assessment
- Tech stack
- docker, sqlite
- Domain
- documentation
- Issue type
- Documentation
- Difficulty
- 2/5
- Estimated time
- 1-3 hours
- Activity status
- Active
- Clarity
- Clearly specified
- Newbie friendliness
- 88/100