How do backups work on my Odoo instance?

Every Odoo instance managed from Hodiploy is backed up automatically, with nothing for you to schedule. Here is exactly what that covers, and what you can do with it.

A backup every night, plus the ones you trigger

An automatic pass runs every night across all your instances. On top of that, the "Back up now" button, in each instance's "Backups" screen, triggers one immediately. That's the reflex to have before a delicate release or before installing a module you don't know.

What a backup contains

A backup is not a single file but a coherent set, taken in one pass:

• the instance's database(s)
• the attachments (the Odoo filestore: documents, images, attached files)
• the instance's configuration
• the data of any addon services the instance runs

These belong together. Restoring a filestore against another night's database would not be a backup but corruption, which is why locking, deleting and restoring always act on the whole set. The screen tells you, for each set, what it holds.

If any piece fails, the whole set is discarded: a partial backup never occupies a slot and is never offered for restore. So you can't restore something incomplete while believing otherwise.

Worth noting: your code is not in the backup, and doesn't need to be. It lives in your Git repository, from which Hodiploy re-clones it at each deployment.

Seven slots, six of which can be locked

Retention is not counted in days but in slots:

• 7 slots per instance
• a new backup replaces the oldest unlocked one
• you can lock up to 6 of those sets, with the "Lock" button

A locked set is never replaced. That's what lets you pin the state before a migration or an accounting close, and find it again months later.

One slot has to stay free to rotate: with 6 sets locked, the instance keeps its 6 pinned sets plus last night's backup, and nothing in between. It's up to you to strike the balance.

The counter at the top of the screen keeps reminding you where you stand, something like "4/7 slots used, 2/6 locked".

Where those backups live

Not on your server. They are stored, encrypted, on infrastructure dedicated to that purpose, which your machine simply has no access to: it is our orchestrator that comes and fetches the data from your server, never your server that writes to the storage.

That direction isn't a technical detail. It means that a compromised server, encrypted by ransomware for instance, cannot destroy any backup, not even its own: the key to the backups isn't there. That is precisely the thing that lets you roll back when everything else has been lost.

If your server stops responding, Hodiploy tells you with a banner, and your backups are unaffected.

You can also download them

A backup is not trapped on our platform. From the same screen, the "Download…" button hands you each piece of a set, in the format it was captured in: a PostgreSQL dump for a database, an archive for the rest. These are the formats our import accepts, and the ones any provider can read back. See how to download a backup.

A deleted instance keeps its backups

Deleting an instance does not erase its backups straight away: they survive for a few days, long enough to change your mind. See the dedicated article on recovering a deleted instance.

And if I need more?

7 sets, or a specific retention policy, is open to discussion: contact us and we'll work out what fits your business.

Updated on: 25/08/2026