# Stop Vaultwarden inside container to restore?

**URL:** <https://vaultwarden.discourse.group/t/stop-vaultwarden-inside-container-to-restore/2347>\
**Category:** Help\
**Created:** [February 7, 2023, 8:08pm UTC](https://vaultwarden.discourse.group/t/stop-vaultwarden-inside-container-to-restore/2347 "2023-02-07T20:08:22Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 3\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![crespire](https://yyz2.discourse-cdn.com/free1/user_avatar/vaultwarden.discourse.group/crespire/32/942_2.png) [@crespire](https://vaultwarden.discourse.group/u/crespire)\
**Post date:** [February 7, 2023, 8:08pm UTC](https://vaultwarden.discourse.group/t/stop-vaultwarden-inside-container-to-restore/2347/1 "2023-02-07T20:08:22Z")

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Hey folks!

I’m just testing my backups and I’ve run into a bit of a snag. I am using the Google Cloud setup via this repository: [GitHub - dadatuputi/bitwarden\_gcloud: Bitwarden installation optimized for Google Cloud's 'always free' f1-micro compute instance](https://github.com/dadatuputi/bitwarden_gcloud)

Things are working out great, I have rclone backup set up, and things are going swimmingly on that side. However, I am having trouble with restoring a backup.

The wiki recommends you restore while vaultwarden is stopped, but I have no clue how to stop the process. What I’m doing is running sh on the vaultwarden container: `docker exec -it bitwarden sh` and I can navigate around inside the container. I was able to download and unpack my `tar.gz` backup file, but changes were not captured on the web vault interface.

I suspect it’s because vaultwarden was still running in the container. Once I’m in the container, how can I stop and re-start vaultwarden?

Sorry if this is an elementary task. I tried `./vaultwarden stop` but that didn’t seem to do the trick, and `--help` didn’t have much.

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**Author:** ![crespire](https://yyz2.discourse-cdn.com/free1/user_avatar/vaultwarden.discourse.group/crespire/32/942_2.png) [@crespire](https://vaultwarden.discourse.group/u/crespire)\
**Post date:** [February 7, 2023, 8:22pm UTC](https://vaultwarden.discourse.group/t/stop-vaultwarden-inside-container-to-restore/2347/2 "2023-02-07T20:22:44Z")

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It strikes me that perhaps I am trying to restore at the wrong “level” and that perhaps what I should be doing is stopping the bitwarden container and restoring to the `/var/lib/docker/volumes/` directory?

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**Author:** ![crespire](https://yyz2.discourse-cdn.com/free1/user_avatar/vaultwarden.discourse.group/crespire/32/942_2.png) [@crespire](https://vaultwarden.discourse.group/u/crespire)\
**Post date:** [February 7, 2023, 9:00pm UTC](https://vaultwarden.discourse.group/t/stop-vaultwarden-inside-container-to-restore/2347/3 "2023-02-07T21:00:39Z")

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This was the ticket. I noticed that the `docker-compose` was reading from `${PWD}/bitwarden` to derive the `/data` inside the container, so I went ahead and restored the data to that directory after stopping the container and it worked as expected.