How to backup a Kaapana instance

In case of platform related system failures, you might have to uninstall the platform. If you have important data/code already in the platform, then in such cases it is best to take a backup of your data before uninstalling the platform. The platform data is stored in stateful directories on your host filesystem.

Data storage in the Kaapana platform

In the default configuration there are two locations on the filesystem, which will be used for stateful data on the host machine:

  1. fast_data_dir=/home/kaapana: Location of (application) data that do not take a lot of space and should be loaded fast. Preferably, an SSD is mounted here.

  2. slow_data_dir=/home/kaapana: Location of huge files, like images or our object store is located here. Preferably, an HDD is mounted here.

They can be adjusted in the deploy-platform-script and can also be identical (everything is stored at one place).

Some details about the data directories are described below:

  • dcm4che: consists mainly of DICOM data

  • minio: consists mainly of buckets such as uploads etc.

  • workflows: the dags folder inside this folder consists of the code of the workflows, e.g. your workflows that were added via VSCode extension will also be found here. data folder consists of data that was created as a result of running workflows. models folder consists of the trained models, if any.

Depending on how you assigned your data directories, you can check for the above folders and create a backup of your platform data.

Data backup options

There are several ways in which you can take a backup of your data, you can either copy the necessary folders to another folder on the same host or to a remote host. Following are just some of the various options:

  • rsync: we can recommend using the command line tool rsync. With this, you can (incrementally) create a backup of your data, e.g. by doing the following:

rsync -a /<source_dir>/ /<destination_directory>

  • scp: secure copy is another command line tool to copy data between hosts via SSH. Unlike rcp, which accomplishes similar task, scp will ask for passwords or passphrases if they are needed for authentication.

  • UI based tools: if you prefer UI based tools, then there are also tools like WinSCP, FileZilla and Cyberduck that are freely available. These would allow you to copy/backup your data safely via different protocols such as FTP, SFTP, SSH, Amazon S3 etc.