5 days of work lost even with backups?

krisn0x · September 7, 2025, 11:52am

You can also check this to backup credentials:

Docker Compose Command can’t find /bin/sh

Here is my way. I have a separate container running alongside main n8n instance. Here is it’s definition in the compose file:

  n8n-backup:
    image: n8nio/n8n:latest
    user: "0:0"
    networks: ['n8n-infra']
    volumes:
      - n8n_storage:/home/node/.n8n:ro
      - ./scripts:/scripts:ro
      - ./n8n_backups:/backups
    environment:
      - DB_TYPE=postgresdb
      - DB_POSTGRESDB_HOST=postgres
      - DB_POSTGRESDB_USER=${POSTGRES_USER}
      - DB_POSTGRESDB_PASSWORD=${POSTGRES_PASSWORD}

      - N8N_ENCRYPTION_KEY
      - N8N_DIAGNOSTICS_ENABLED=false
      - N8N_ENFORCE_SETTINGS_FILE_PERMISSIONS=true
      - N8N_BLOCK_ENV_ACCESS_IN_NODE=false
      - N8N_RUNNERS_ENABLED=true

    entrypoint: ["/bin/sh","-c","/scripts/backup.sh"]

backup script (in .scripts/backup.sh):

#!/bin/sh
set -eu
echo "[backup] booting…"
mkdir -p /backups/workflows /backups/credentials

# Optional: show DB type to verify config
echo "[backup] DB_TYPE=${DB_TYPE:-sqlite}"

while true; do
  TS="$(date +%F_%H%M%S)"
  echo "[backup] exporting at $TS"

  n8n export:workflow --all --output="/backups/workflows/workflows_${TS}.json"
  n8n export:credentials --all --output="/backups/credentials/credentials_${TS}.json"

  # Retention
  find /backups -type f -mtime +14 -delete || true

  sleep 21600  # 6h
done

After bringing the container up here are the logs from the container:

$ docker logs 0d99b22b58f5

[backup] booting…
[backup] DB_TYPE=postgresdb
[backup] exporting at 2025-09-05_135053
Successfully exported 94 workflows.
Successfully exported 90 credentials.

Here is the content of the .n8n_backups/:

$ tree n8n_backups/

n8n_backups/
├── credentials
│   └── credentials_2025-09-05_135053.json
└── workflows
    └── workflows_2025-09-05_135053.json

2 directories, 2 files