Why do I lose contents of my database after a heroku dyno restart?

Question

Anytime my app goes to sleep and comes back on, I lose data in my database And I'm not storing any media, it's just form data (texts)... I built the app on strapi and I've followed all their guidelines but it keeps happening. I'd be happy if anyone can help

Answer 1

Local data (files, db) is cleared after a Dyno restart because the Heroku File System is ephemeral. A Dyno is restarted (at least) every 24hrs.

In your case Strapi uses SQLite where data is saved in a local file.

Strapi suggests to configure Postgres on Heroku, alternatively you can use an external DB storage service.

Answer 2

First of all:

• As you create content types with strapi it generates the code (= new files) for the according controllers/routes/services
• Heroku does not persist data after a restart
• After a restart strapi checks which content types exist in the code and deletes the tables of nonexisting types from the database.

Therefore, on Heroku you have to set up all your content types locally and connect to an external db (e.g. Heroku Postgres) but never strapi's default textfile based db. Then push the generated files and finally deploy.

Thus, on Heroku you should always run in production mode. This way the option to alter content types is completely blocked and you will not run into the issue of data loss after a restart.