Hi! I use n8n on DigitalOcean. I saw the recent backup today and decided to back up, like I have so many times already. After this backup, I opened the web app and realized major workflows and updates were lost, and it reverted to a former, older history.
Please, is there a way to recover? Here are the exact commands I ran in order:
sudo docker compose stop
sudo docker compose pull
sudo docker compose down
sudo docker compose up -d
Please advise on what to do –
hello @Idris
it depends on how did you the backups. n8n has cli commands to backup or restore workflows
CLI commands | n8n Docs
Thanks for the links. I only used the following, in order
sudo docker compose stop
sudo docker compose pull
sudo docker compose down
sudo docker compose up -d
Since I didn’t use the CLI commands you shared, are the workflows lost, or is there another way to retrieve them?
docker compose has nothing to do with the backups…
it only re-deploys the services. If you didn’t have any volumes attached to the services as a persistent storage, then you can’t restore anything. Otherwise, your workflows should be there.
Was there a solution to this? The last 10 days of work got wiped out accross our entire team.
In general… If you can’t handle that question on you own, then the self-hosted instance is not the option and better to use cloud instance 
To keep data, you will need to backup the n8n’s database. There are many options to do so. And many cloud providers provide ready-to-use solutions for that, e.g. Worry-Free Managed PostgreSQL Hosting | DigitalOcean
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