Migrating from 0.7 to 0.8

3 min

This guide explains how to migrate to 0.8 if you have an existing 0.7 cluster. We don't recommend trying to migrate to 0.8 directly from 0.6 or older.

We make no guarantee that this migration will work perfectly: back up all your data before attempting it!

Garage v0.8 introduces new data tables that allow the counting of objects in buckets in order to implement bucket quotas. A manual migration step is required to first count objects in Garage buckets and populate these tables with accurate data.

Simple migration procedure (takes cluster offline for a while)

The migration steps are as follows:

  1. Disable API and web access. Garage v0.7 does not support disabling these endpoints but you can change the port number or stop your reverse proxy for instance.
  2. Do garage repair --all-nodes --yes tables and garage repair --all-nodes --yes blocks, check the logs and check that all data seems to be synced correctly between nodes. If you have time, do additional checks (versions, block_refs, etc.)
  3. Check that queues are empty: run garage stats to query them or inspect metrics in the Grafana dashboard.
  4. Turn off Garage v0.7
  5. Backup the metadata folder of all your nodes! For instance, use the following command if your metadata directory is /var/lib/garage/meta: cd /var/lib/garage ; tar -acf meta-v0.7.tar.zst meta/
  6. Install Garage v0.8
  7. Before starting Garage v0.8, run the offline migration step: garage offline-repair --yes object_counters. This can take a while to run, depending on the number of objects stored in your cluster.
  8. Turn on Garage v0.8
  9. Do garage repair --all-nodes --yes tables and garage repair --all-nodes --yes blocks. Wait for a full table sync to run.
  10. Your upgraded cluster should be in a working state. Re-enable API and Web access and check that everything went well.
  11. Monitor your cluster in the next hours to see if it works well under your production load, report any issue.

Minimal downtime migration procedure

The migration to Garage v0.8 can be done with almost no downtime, by restarting all nodes at once in the new version. The only limitation with this method is that bucket sizes and item counts will not be estimated correctly until all nodes have had a chance to run their offline migration procedure.

The migration steps are as follows:

  1. Do garage repair --all-nodes --yes tables and garage repair --all-nodes --yes blocks, check the logs and check that all data seems to be synced correctly between nodes. If you have time, do additional checks (versions, block_refs, etc.)

  2. Turn off each node individually; back up its metadata folder (see above); turn it back on again. This will allow you to take a backup of all nodes without impacting global cluster availability. You can do all nodes of a single zone at once as this does not impact the availability of Garage.

  3. Prepare your binaries and configuration files for Garage v0.8

  4. Shut down all v0.7 nodes simultaneously, and restart them all simultaneously in v0.8. Use your favorite deployment tool (Ansible, Kubernetes, Nomad) to achieve this as fast as possible.

  5. At this point, Garage will indicate invalid values for the size and number of objects in each bucket (most likely, it will indicate zero). To fix this, take each node offline individually to do the offline migration step: garage offline-repair --yes object_counters. Again you can do all nodes of a single zone at once.