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 terraform force-unlock
command can
override the protections Terraform uses to prevent two processes from
modifying state at the same time. You might need this if a Terraform 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 terraform state pull
command and
the terraform 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.