The official docker documentation suggests as a good practice to backup the entire docker volume as it is.

When you need to back up, restore, or migrate data from one Docker host to another, volumes are a better choice. You can stop containers using the volume, then back up the volume’s directory (such as /var/lib/docker/volumes/).

At the same time the docs state that one must not modify volumes under no circumstance. And restoring a volume manually into the /var/lib/docker/volumes/ violates that warning. So these two statements seem to be contradictory to me.

Volumes are stored in a part of the host filesystem which is managed by Docker (/var/lib/docker/volumes/ on Linux). Non-Docker processes should not modify this part of the filesystem.

Questions:

• Is it really safe to backup and restore volumes in that fashion between different versions of docker runtime?
• Do volumes have some inner structure that is dependent on the runtime version? Or are they just regular files?
• Is it safer to mount the volume to some container and backup it's data from the inside of the container?

The official docker documentation suggests as a good practice to backup the entire docker volume as it is.

When you need to back up, restore, or migrate data from one Docker host to another, volumes are a better choice. You can stop containers using the volume, then back up the volume’s directory (such as /var/lib/docker/volumes/).

At the same time the docs state that one should must not modify volumes under no circumstance. And restoring a volume manually into the /var/lib/docker/volumes/ violates that warning. So these two statements seem to be contradictory to me.

Volumes are stored in a part of the host filesystem which is managed by Docker (/var/lib/docker/volumes/ on Linux). Non-Docker processes should not modify this part of the filesystem.

Questions:

• Is it really safe to backup and restore volumes in that fashion between different versions of docker runtime?
• Do volumes have some inner structure that is dependent on the runtime version? Or are they just regular files?
• Is it safer to mount the volume to some container and backup it's data from the inside of the container?

The official docker documentation suggests as a good practice to backup the entire docker volume as it is.

When you need to back up, restore, or migrate data from one Docker host to another, volumes are a better choice. You can stop containers using the volume, then back up the volume’s directory (such as /var/lib/docker/volumes/).

At the same time the docs state that one must not modify volumes under no circumstance.

Volumes are stored in a part of the host filesystem which is managed by Docker (/var/lib/docker/volumes/ on Linux). Non-Docker processes should not modify this part of the filesystem.

Questions:

• Is it really safe to backup and restore volumes in that fashion between different versions of docker runtime?
• Do volumes have some inner structure that is dependent on the runtime version? Or are they just regular files?
• Is it safer to mount the volume to some container and backup it's data from the inside of the container?

The official docker documentation suggests as a good practice to backup the entire docker volume as it is.

When you need to back up, restore, or migrate data from one Docker host to another, volumes are a better choice. You can stop containers using the volume, then back up the volume’s directory (such as /var/lib/docker/volumes/).

At the same time the docs state that one must not modify volumes under no circumstance. And restoring a volume manually into the /var/lib/docker/volumes/ violates that warning. So these two statements seem to be contradictory to me.

Volumes are stored in a part of the host filesystem which is managed by Docker (/var/lib/docker/volumes/ on Linux). Non-Docker processes should not modify this part of the filesystem.

Questions:

• Is it really safe to backup and restore volumes in that fashion between different versions of docker runtime?
• Do volumes have some inner structure that is dependent on the runtime version? Or are they just regular files?
• Is it safer to mount the volume to some container and backup it's data from the inside of the container?