Skip to content

Getting Started

This guide walks you through installing django-rclone and running your first backup.

Prerequisites

Verify rclone is available:

rclone version

Install django-rclone

pip install django-rclone

Configure rclone

If you haven't already, create an rclone remote. rclone's interactive config makes this straightforward:

rclone config

This walks you through setting up a remote -- S3, Google Cloud Storage, Backblaze B2, SFTP, a local path, or any of 70+ providers.

For quick local testing, you can create a local remote:

rclone config create localbackup local

This creates a remote called localbackup that stores files on the local filesystem.

For provider-specific setup instructions (Cloudflare R2, etc.), see Storage Providers.

Configure Django

Add django_rclone to your installed apps and point it at your rclone remote:

# settings.py

INSTALLED_APPS = [
    # ...
    "django_rclone",
]

DJANGO_RCLONE = {
    "REMOTE": "localbackup:/var/backups/myproject",
}

The REMOTE value follows rclone's remote:path format. For the local remote above, this means backups will be written to /var/backups/myproject/.

For a cloud remote like S3, it might look like:

DJANGO_RCLONE = {
    "REMOTE": "s3:my-backup-bucket/myproject",
}

Run your first backup

python manage.py dbbackup

You should see output like:

Backing up database 'default' to db/default-2024-01-15-120000.dump
Backup completed: db/default-2024-01-15-120000.dump

Verify the backup exists

python manage.py listbackups

Name                                               Size     Modified
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
default-2024-01-15-120000.dump                      24.5 KB  2024-01-15T12:00:00Z

Restore from backup

python manage.py dbrestore

This automatically finds and restores the most recent backup. To restore a specific backup:

python manage.py dbrestore --input-path default-2024-01-15-120000.dump

dbrestore prompts for confirmation by default. Use --noinput for non-interactive execution.

Back up media files

If your project uses MEDIA_ROOT, you can sync media files to the remote:

python manage.py mediabackup

This uses rclone sync, so only changed files are transferred on subsequent runs.

Next steps