Starting with Podman 5.7, some of our users have noticed warning messages being printed by Podman when they run commands, looking a little like this:

The deprecated BoltDB database driver is in use. This driver will be removed in the upcoming Podman 6.0 release in mid 2026. It is advised that you migrate to SQLite to avoid issues when this occurs.

This message indicates your Podman installation is using a BoltDB database and support for BoltDB will be removed in the upcoming 6.0 release in 2026. When this happens, if you have not migrated to the new SQLite database backend, you will lose access to all your existing containers, pods, and volumes, as the information on their existence – stored in the BoltDB database – can no longer be read. To avoid this, it is necessary to migrate your installation to SQLite.

Migration can be performed three ways. The simplest is to remove your entire existing installation of Podman with podman system reset, after which the new SQLite database backend will be used. As this involves losing all your containers, pods, images, and volumes, most users will likely want another option. 

We are adding support for automatic migration in Podman 5.8 (which will release in the second week of February) via this PR. This will attempt to automatically migrate the database on system reboot, but can also be manually triggered via a new option, podman system migrate –migrate-db. We strongly recommend this option. 

Finally, for some users, a manual migration can be performed. For systems only running Quadlets, this would be very simple (exporting volumes with podman volume export, running podman system reset, and re-importing all volumes with podman volume import), but other scenarios – including re-creating containers and pods – become considerably more complicated. We do not recommend manual migration in these cases.

This concludes the core content of this post, but users who want more details can keep reading for context on what BoltDB is, why we’re moving away from it, and why Podman started printing warning messages.

When it was originally written, Podman used a lightweight database written in Go called BoltDB. Unfortunately, we encountered stability and data corruption issues with it, which led us to write a new database backend using SQLite, a much more common and proven database, which became available in Podman 4.5.0 in April of 2023. After several months of testing, we were confident enough to make it the default in Podman 4.8.0 in November of that same year. We disabled the creation of new Bolt databases with Podman 5.0.0 in March of 2024, about a year after introducing the new SQLite-backed database.

Now, around two years later, we are looking to remove BoltDB entirely from our codebase. There are several reasons for this, but all ultimately boil down to making Podman easier to maintain. Since introducing SQLite, we’ve needed to make all changes that affect the database in two places: the legacy BoltDB code and the new SQLite code. Further, the design of Podman’s BoltDB backend included a significant amount of accrued technical debt from years of development, making it hard to work with. By removing this legacy database backend, we make developing new features easier, and reduce the likelihood of bugs in our database code.

When the Podman maintainers decided to remove BoltDB support, we knew that it was necessary to give users plenty of warning that action was required. We actually began printing warnings with Podman 5.6 in August of 2025, but they were only present in debug logs, not printed by default. With Podman 5.7, we upped the severity of the log so it was printed by default. This might seem a curious decision as a migration command was not yet available, but we wanted to give as much notice as possible of a scenario that could potentially make Podman unusable for some users. Further, adding the warning helped us gauge how widespread usage of BoltDB still is, and how many people required a migration tool.