How to create a scrambled dump of Mesh data for sharing with new devs

This is a draft

For some tickets, it's helpful, if not essential, for developers to have a copy of Mesh data. However, we don't want to give away peoples' PII. To solve this, we've written a scramble script that can be used to "sterilize" an existing copy of the mesh data.

To acquire this data, follow the below steps:

Log into the Mesh AWS Account Navigate to the meshdb-backups S3 bucket, and download a copy of a recent backup. Use the following command to copy it into your running postgres container
docker cp <path to downloaded backup>/2025-02-19-214000.psql.bin meshdb-postgres-1:/ Import the backup into your database
docker run -it meshdb-postgres-1 pg_restore -d meshdb -U meshdb -j 6 --verbose /2025-02-19-214000.psql.bin Be patient. This will take several minutes. Run meshdb and spot check the admin panel to ensure the restore worked well
Use the scramble script to sanitize the data
$ python src/manage.py scramble_members Drop the users
Dump the database and copy it back over to your host
`docker exec -it meshdb-postgres-1 pg_dump -d meshdb -U meshdb -Fc -f scrambled.psql.bin`
`docker cp meshdb-postgres-1:/scrambled.psql.bin  ~/Downloads`