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Recovering from State Disasters

If something has gone horribly wrong (possibly due to accidents when performing other state manipulation actions), you might need to take drastic actions with your state data.

  • The tofu force-unlock command can override the protections OpenTofu uses to prevent two processes from modifying state at the same time. You might need this if a OpenTofu process (like a normal apply) is unexpectedly terminated (like by the complete destruction of the VM it's running in) before it can release its lock on the state backend. Do not run this until you are completely certain what happened to the process that caused the lock to get stuck.

  • The tofu state pull command and the tofu state push command can directly read and write entire state files from and to the configured backend. You might need this for obtaining or restoring a state backup.