Maintenance¶
Upgrading CryptPad¶
To upgrade your CryptPad instance, please follow the indications provided in the Upgrade notes section of the releases published on GitHub.
If OnlyOffice is installed, it also needs to be upgraded:
./install-onlyoffice.sh
Bemerkung
If you are upgrading from an oldest release than the latest one, please read the upgrade notes of all versions between yours and the previous ones to avoid configuration issues (e.g. you are on 5.5.0 and want to upgrade to 2024.3.0, you'll need to upgrade to 5.6.0 and 5.7.0 before)
Database administration¶
CryptPad stores user data on the file system rather than a relational database. The paths to different types of data are configurable in cryptpad/config/config.js:
filePath: './datastore/',
archivePath: './data/archive',
pinPath: './data/pins',
taskPath: './data/tasks',
blockPath: './block',
blobPath: './blob',
blobStagingPath: './data/blobstage',
decreePath: './data/decrees',
logPath: './data/logs',
Each CryptPad document is a “chain” of edits stored in a file in filePath. To find a specific document in the database, use the identifier found in the document properties.
For example the document with identifier bb1edc4cb7648605284db30dfcd2eebf can be found at cryptpad/datastore/bb/bb1edc4cb7648605284db30dfcd2eebf.ndjson.
To fully remove a document from the database, simply remove the file using the operating system functionality.
To completely reset the database and remove all documents, delete the entire cryptpad/datastore folder. The folder will be recreated the next time CryptPad starts.
Backup and migration¶
To back up or migrate a CryptPad instance, check where data is being written as indicated in cryptpad/config/config.js.
Locate the following directories to backup or migrate:
data/datastore/block/blob/
Additionally, configurations and customizations may be backed up or migrated: - config/config.js - customize/ (or customize.dist if modifications have been made directly in the source tree)
The contents of CryptPad’s filesystem database are encrypted, it is therefore reasonably safe to back up to a cloud service without violating users’ privacy, though this will make metadata available (e.g. file creation/modification dates).
Advanced administration¶
In the event of a document becoming corrupted, it is possible to delete individual sets of changes from the database.
Locate the relevant channel, or document ID as explained above. Note that the document properties can be opened by right clicking the document in the drive, if the document cannot be opened.
Open the channel in a text editor. Each line of the file represents a set of changes sent by a user, if you delete particular lines from the file, those messages will no longer be sent to clients. Note that the content of each line contains what seems to be random data: this is because all messages are encrypted by clients before being sent to the server. This makes it difficult to determine which messages are responsible for making a document unrecoverable by other means.
It is quite likely that deleting messages will cause the document to become unreadable. If you know that the document was working until very recently, you can try removing the most recent messages a few at a time until the desired content is recovered.
Warnung
Making manual modifications to a corrupted file is likely to make matters worse. It is highly recommended to back up the file before attempting manual recovery.