[rpglover64]

Thank you for doing an AMA! I know I'm late to the party, but I have an experience-report/feature-request/question:

I tried to use GitLab in a classroom setting, and it went okay. One of the reasons we decided against using it the next year was the apparent lack of an archival backup feature (c.f. my Stack Exchange [question](http://serverfault.com/q/627618/172148) on the matter.)

We'd like to start completely fresh every year, so that former course assistants and students don't have access, but we'd also like to keep around the old data (for various reasons). Given that GitLab can only restore a backup to the same version that generated it, the only option this left us with was to archive the whole VM, which just feels sloppy.

I understand that this feature is not a priority and is a relatively large technical undertaking, so I'm not holding my breath on it getting implemented; even so, I thought that sharing my experience would be valuable.

Once again, thank you for engaging with the community and for such a great product.

[sytse]

It is tricky to restore a backup on a newer version.

I think archiving the whole VM makes sense.

Another solution would be to start with a fresh namespace/group each year instead of a fresh server.