| name | workspace-backup |
| description | Back up the REANA workspace (data, code, figures, chat/agent state, skills) to a downloadable tar.gz — recipes and results, never venv binaries. Restore = untar; skill venvs re-provision themselves. |
| version | 1.0.0 |
| author | Hermes / AIP |
| license | MIT |
| metadata | {"hermes":{"tags":["backup","workspace","archive","restore","reana"],"category":"astronomy"}} |
Workspace Backup — recipes + data, never binaries
When to Use
When the user asks to back up / snapshot / export their workspace, or before a
risky operation (workflow re-create, major cleanup, image migration). The
workspace ($REANA_WORKSPACE) is persistent NFS, but it is destroyed if the
REANA workflow is deleted — a backup archive is the insurance.
Principles
- Back up recipes and results, never rebuildable binaries. Skill venvs
(
.hermes/envs/) are caches — they re-provision automatically from each
skill's prerequisites.python. Excluding them keeps archives small and
portable across image updates.
- Chat history, memory, skills, and config live in
.hermes/ — include them.
- Check the size FIRST; tell the user what you're archiving and how big.
Backup recipe
cd "$REANA_WORKSPACE"
du -sh . .hermes 2>/dev/null
mkdir -p backups
STAMP=$(date +%Y%m%d-%H%M%S)
tar -czf "backups/workspace-$STAMP.tar.gz" \
--exclude='./backups' \
--exclude='./.hermes/envs' \
--exclude='./.hermes/logs' \
--exclude='*/__pycache__' \
--exclude='./.hermes/webui/media_cache' \
.
ls -lh "backups/workspace-$STAMP.tar.gz"
Report the final archive path + size. If the workspace holds multi-GB data
files, ask the user whether to include raw data or archive only code +
.hermes (add --exclude for the heavy dirs they name).
How the user downloads it
- JupyterLab file browser (the session's Lab tab): right-click
backups/workspace-<stamp>.tar.gz → Download.
- From their laptop:
reana-client download backups/workspace-<stamp>.tar.gz -w <workflow>
(needs their REANA token; workflow name shown in DRP-Hub).
S3 upload is planned (per-user secrets contract) but not yet available — do
not attempt to push archives to remote storage.
Restore recipe (into a fresh or existing workspace)
cd "$REANA_WORKSPACE"
tar -xzf backups/workspace-<stamp>.tar.gz
- Config/SOUL/skills restore as files immediately (restart the Hermes tile or
start a new chat to pick them up).
- Per-skill venvs are NOT in the archive by design: each rebuilds on the next
skill_manage(edit) of that skill (any no-op edit triggers provisioning
from prerequisites.python). Tell the user the first use of an affected
skill will pay a one-time environment rebuild (~1–5 min).
Cleanup
Keep at most the 3 newest archives unless the user says otherwise:
cd "$REANA_WORKSPACE/backups" && ls -1t workspace-*.tar.gz | tail -n +4 | xargs -r rm --
