I don’t know where else to put this, I don’t know if this is a bug or intended behaviour.
I am extremely disappointed in the Ghost Backup function.
An attempt earlier today to upgrade Ghost v5.42 to the latest stable version, caused a chain reaction where the Ghost CLI and Ghost App had a failure which forced me to uninstall the app. I did my due diligence and I ran ghost backup. I saw the the file, I back upped the file locally.
After several hours struggling with nodejs versions, ghost cli breaking in the middle of the migration leaving my database unrecoverable, forcing several reinstalls of everything from NodeJS to a broken systemctl service. I was finally able to recover to an empty ghost blog. I followed the instructions to import the data using ghost import cli function.
To my surprise, it did not import my email subscribers. It did not import any of my settings, or my mailgun settings. No matter, I understand that might be sensitive data. So I just went through my settings and altered it to my personal defaults.
I dragged across the email subscriber excel file into the import subscribers.
And there it was.
15 users.
Ghost backup’s function only saved the 15 most recent of my ~70 total users.
I know 70 users is nothing to most of you, but I spent the last three years building up that very small amount of users. It was not much but I was very proud of it. When I sent out email I would see a few early subscribers would always read it every week, a few would interact with the thumbs up, and thumbs down.
And Yes I understand that in production you never assume that things like backups work, and I did not have a rolling backup. the Ghost uninstall wiped all the previous backups, since backups were saved next to the main app.
I understand that at the end of the day this falls on me, to have been manually backing up.
I unfortunately assumed that a ghost backup function would backup the entire of the ghostblog as it was at that time.
I don’t know if this is how the ghost backup function is supposed to work or not. But if it is, a warning could be placed in the installation page or the How to backup your self-hosted Ghost install - Ghost Developers
so that users know that a manual backup of your members is necessary, regardless of whether or not you use the cli.
I would like to end this by saying, I am very grateful for Ghost and I know the developers have put in alot of work and sometimes things just happen. I have enjoyed using it these past few years. I will probably return to the blog once I take the time to deal with this.
Thank you to the community and to the developers for continuing to maintain Ghost.
