Opposite anecdata my GitLab install absolutely self destructed itself at one point and I had to rebuild it myself, waste of a weekend
That’s frightening, we’ve been using it for multiple years now. It’s running fine and the only short downtime is every few weeks for the update.
What happened to your instance?
Tried restoring it to the older version to run through the upgrade path and the process didn't want to work. Wish I could be more specific here but I gave up on it and decided it'd just be quicker to whip up a script to recreate all the groups/projects/CICD in a new install and push repos from backups
Don't let your GitLab server get outdated and don't consider it a valid backup unless it was taken with the latest version to avoid the same
Also it wasn't relevant here but make sure you're backing up the etc files too, while that wasn't an issue for me it could easily trip you over in a worst case scenario ( https://docs.gitlab.com/charts/backup-restore/backup.html#ba... )
Not a complaint, it's just one of the hats that needs wearing sometimes, would have been easier on me if someone else was handling it though :P
We’ve been updating about as soon as an update is released for a while now, with very good results. (I’d rather have to restore a backup or a snapshot than to be running without the latest security fixes. If gitlab is down for an hour (didn’t happen in ~3 years) at least all developers have their local repo.)