Backups & restore

Your memories are too valuable to lose, and because they are just files in a Git repository, backing them up is wonderfully simple: a backup is a push of the vault to a private remote, and a restore is a pull of it back. There are no special snapshot formats to learn.

What gets backed up

The vault is the backed-up thing — every memory, handoff, and reference, with its full history. Because every change is already a Git commit, the backup is just that repository pushed to a private GitHub repo you own.

Two things are deliberately left out of a backup:

• The master key. Restoring needs you to supply it again — that is the point; keeping the key out of the backup means a leaked backup cannot be decrypted. Keep the key (shown once when you first ran the server) somewhere safe and separate.
• The settings file, which holds your encrypted credentials, lives beside the vault rather than in it. If you want settings back without re-entering them, include a volume snapshot (below) as well.

Setting up automatic backups

Open Settings → Backups in the dashboard. There you can:

1. Choose a target — a private GitHub repository (owner/repo) and a fine-grained personal access token with read/write access to it. The token is encrypted at rest and never leaves the server or appears in a URL.
2. Set a schedule — turn on scheduled backups and choose how often (in minutes); the server pushes the vault whenever the interval elapses.
3. Back up on demand — press Backup now any time.

The page shows the last successful backup and a banner if the most recent one failed; you can also set a webhook so a failure pings you elsewhere.

Restoring

A restore clones your backup remote into a fresh data location, replacing the current vault. You will need to supply the master key again, because it was kept out of the backup. The dashboard’s Backups page guides a restore (it safely sets the current vault aside first); the same thing can be done from the server’s command line, which is covered — along with the exact commands — in Authentication & secrets and Self-host.

An alternative: volume snapshots

If you would rather use your own backup tooling, you can snapshot the whole data volume (a plain compressed tarball, or your cloud platform’s volume snapshots). This captures the settings file too, so it is a good complement to the Git-based vault backup.

If a recall index ever looks wrong

The search index agents use is rebuilt automatically from the vault, so there is nothing in it to back up or repair. If you ever edit the vault files directly, outside the dashboard, you can force a rebuild from the server command line — but in normal use you never need to.