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How to back up and restore application data

Backup and restoration of application data can be achieved easily with the aam (Anbox Application Manager) utility helper installed in the image. The aam can bundle any necessary application data together into a tarball file or extract the tarball file to a particular application folder according to the specified package name.

Back up application data

See the following script for an example for backing up your data:

 #!/bin/sh -ex
aam backup com.canonical.candy
TARBALL_FILE=$(basename $(find ./ -name *.tar.bz2))
 # Upload the tarball to public or private cloud storage service
curl -i -X POST --data-binary @"${TARBALL_FILE}" <cloud_storage_upload_url>

Running this script in an addon post-stop hook will back up the user data of a particular application with aam and upload the resulting tarball file to the cloud storage service when an instance is stopped.

If boot-package is specified in the application manifest file, you can also back up the boot application data simply with the flag --boot-package.

aam backup --boot-package

aam will automatically query the boot package name from the instance and back up the relevant application data. As result aam will create a tarball file with the name <package name>.tar.bz2.

Restore application data

The application data can be restored with the following pre-start hook when an instance is up and running:

#!/bin/sh -ex
# Download the tarball from public or private cloud storage service
if curl -o app-data.tar.bz2 <cloud_storage_download_url> ; then
  aam restore -p app-data.tar.bz2 com.canonical.candy
fi

Or by relying on the boot package of the instance:

aam restore -p app-data.tar.bz2 --boot-package

Filter data to be backed up

Sometimes, not every piece of data is useful (for example, cache), and backing up the entire application data takes a long time and occupies more disk space if the application data is large. aam supports two filters to back up files that match wildcard patterns:

Filter Description
include Include files in resulting tarball with a wildcard
exclude Exclude files in resulting tarball with a wildcard

Please refer to the pattern syntax here.

For example, with the following filters:

aam backup com.canonical.candy \
   --include=/data/data/com.canonical.candy/cache/*.db \
   --include=/data/data/com.canonical.candy/new_level/fixture* \
   --exclude=/sdcard/Android/data/com.canonical.candy/user_data/*.jpeg \
   --exclude=/data/data/com.canonical.candy/new_level/*.cfg

The resulting tarball file will include the following files:

  • Files with db suffix below the folder /data/data/com.canonical.candy/cache
  • Files with fixture prefix below the folder /data/data/com.canonical.candy/new_level

And exclude the following files:

  • Files with jpeg suffix below the folder /sdcard/Android/data/com.canonical.candy/user_data
  • Files with cfg suffix below the folder /data/data/com.canonical.candy/new_level

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