Backup and restore docker images

In order to fully backup images in a system (for moving or copying them somewhere else) you need five steps:

1. Save the tags for the images
2. Backup the images
3. Transfer the backups
4. Restore the images
5. Restore the tags

This assumes you want to backup all the images on the system together.

The backup part is via Franklin Piat

Save the tags

Using docker images we can save the tags of all our images in the format we desire:

docker images --format " :" > /path/to/tags.txt

This creates a file similar to this:

abcdef012345 ubuntu:16.04
bcdef0123456 repository/image1:latest
bcdef0123456 repository/image1:other_tag

Backup the images

This will create a single tar file holding all the images together.

docker save $(docker images -q) -o /path/to/images.tar

You can later compress this file to save some space. Here I assume you simply have the .tar file.

Transfer the backups

Move both the .tar with the images and the .txt with the tags to the target.

Restore the images

Restore the images using:

docker load -i /path/to/images.tar

Restore the tags

We now retag each image from our backup:

while read line; do docker tag $line; done < /path/to/tags.txt

Extra: moving images locally to a different storage driver

Once upon a time, in a system I had to change the storage driver due to some issues.

If I had just defined a different driver, all the images would be “missing” in the new storage driver (although still existing in the old one), so it required a full backup and restore, with some cleaning in the middle.

Please note: this procedure will destroy all your docker data (not only images), so make sure you understand what you are doing and have backups of everything.

Keep in mind that I did this with only images in the system. No running or stopped containers, volumes or anything else.

To migrate from overlay to overlay2:

1. If needed, fix and define the overlay storage driver
2. Make a backup of the images and their tags
3. Clean up all the images
4. Use docker system prune to make sure no leftovers remain in the system
5. Change the storage driver to overlay2
6. Restore all the images and their tags