Restoring Databases

Note: gds-cli maybe installed and accessible via either gds-cli, gds or cod depending on your installation. gds is also an alias belonging to github cli tools.

A note on the Session database: In case of a Business Continuity restore of the Production environment to a new AWS account, DO NOT restore the session database. The session database is only kept for analytical purposes and for admins to view logs. A restore of the session database takes over an hour and would delay our recovery time. If you do wish restore the Session database for analysis purposes, ensure that your Bastion server has at least 100GB volume provisioned and the Session database instance has 100GB of storage allocated.

The nightly database backups for each environment are stored in an S3 bucket for each Govwifi environment called govwifi--london-mysql-backup-data. The CO/GDS IT Infrastructure team also keeps an additional copy of these backups. In the event that we loose access to our AWS accounts, we can request a copy directly from the IT team. Databases can be restored from the nightly backups by following the instructions below (note: gds-cli may be aliased to gds):

Locate the gpg passphrase you need in the govwifi-build repo (for example the passphrase for staging is located here). Retrieve the secret using the following command:

PASSWORD_STORE_DIR=~/path_to_govwifi-build-repo-on-your-machine/passwords pass edit keys/govwifi-database-<environment-name>-s3-encryption-key

For example:

PASSWORD_STORE_DIR=~/path_to_govwifi-build-repo-on-your-machine/passwords pass edit keys/govwifi-database-development-s3-encryption-key

Locate the correct database file, e.g. staging backup files: Example using gds cli:

gds-cli aws govwifi-staging -- aws s3 ls govwifi-staging-london-mysql-backup-data

Example using cod cli

cod aws govwifi-staging -- aws s3 ls govwifi-staging-london-mysql-backup-data

Download the database backup file that you need, e.g. staging admin DB: Example using gds cli

gds-cli aws govwifi-staging -- aws s3 cp s3://govwifi-staging-london-mysql-backup-data/govwifi-backup-admin-2023-01-25-00-30.sql.gz.gpg .

Example using cod cli

cod aws govwifi-staging -- aws s3 cp s3://govwifi-staging-london-mysql-backup-data/govwifi-backup-admin-2023-01-25-00-30.sql.gz.gpg .

Then upload the file to the staging bastion server in the eu-west-2 region, e.g.:

scp govwifi-databasename-datetime.sql.gz.gpg bastion.staging.govwifi:/tmp

Login to the bastion server and decrypt the gpg file:

cd /tmp
gpg --output govwifi-backup-databasename.sql.gz --decrypt govwifi-backup-databasename.sql.gz.gpg

Unzip the file:

gzip -d govwifi-backup-admin-databasename.sql.gz

Import into mysql (the database credentials are located in AWS secrets manager)

mysql -u <username> -h <hostname> -D <databasename> -p < govwifi-backup-databasename.sql

This page was last reviewed on 13 August 2025. It needs to be reviewed again on 13 February 2026 by the page owner #govwifi .