All docker containers, images disappeared

Dear All,

Found out today that all my docker images, containers are all gone. Only thing I remember doing was to install the local registry and start it. But /var/lib/docker has all the docker image files, container files etc. The changes that were done to docker were:

  1. Registry configuration
  2. In docker swarm : stack deploy of applications, services deployment.

Is there way to recover from this loss ? Why was there no warning during the docker configuration of docker registry ?

Seems like docker is extremely unstable for long term persistent applications to be running continuously. Suddenly one day it could all disappear without warning. For next couple of months, I would focus of docker save / restore to make sure that I have a copy of it everywhere.

Your thoughts.

1 Like

Help us to help you: what os? what docker version? What exactly did you do (as in the exact commands and if used the content of the docker-compose.yml)?

meyay,
Thanks for the response. This is docker on ubuntu 18.04.5. I don’t know what I did which caused all (images, containers) of it to disappear but data was absolutely intact in /var/lib/docker directory. I couldn’t start docker at all.
But, good news is that I was able to fully recover all the lost data ( images and containers ) all back into docker.
I like the docker’s filesystem based model, so manipulating /var/lib/docker works well when bringing back docker online.
All I did was to start fresh. 1. Move the corrupted docker lib to OLD /var/lib/docker to /var/lib/docker.OLD
2. Create empty docker directory in /var/lib
3. start docker clean.
4. stop docker
5. move one directory at a time from /var/lib/docker.OLD to /var/lib/docker and see it docker starts.

It should restore normally, including volumes directory.

Glad if it works out.

Bare in mind that some folders might requite other folders to provide a dependency they need.

Great! Thanks for updating me this information. I’m also glad if it works great.

Same thing happened to me, so I did what you did and deleted lib/var/docker and made new empty file. I have been using WSL though so maybe this is where the issues are coming from??

superdexter23 has a solution that worked perfectly for me.