💾 Backup & Restore
Download a complete backup of your system, or restore it from one — plus the automatic safeguards that keep your data safe.
The Backup & Restore page (under Settings, admin-only) is your local backup control. Download backup saves a single .zip holding everything — all linen data, your connection settings, and the server .env — so you always have a copy you can keep off the machine. Restore loads one back.
Restoring
- Choose the backup
.zipto restore. - Leave “Keep current backup & email settings” ticked (the default), so restoring an older copy can’t silently switch off your off-site backup or blank your credentials.
- Type RESTORE to confirm, and restore.
Watch out Restoring replaces all current data and settings with the chosen backup. A pre-restore snapshot of the current state is saved first (so a mistaken restore is recoverable), but this is destructive — use it with care.
The automatic safeguards
- Every save also writes a rolling per-save backup (a ring of recent copies), and an hourly backup zip is kept for a week — so there is always a very recent copy to fall back to.
- If the data file is ever missing or blank on startup, the system self-heals — it automatically restores the newest good copy from those backups instead of starting empty.
- A blank or reset store pauses the scheduled backups, so a bad state can never overwrite your good backups.
- For an off-site copy see Nextcloud Backup; for a live standby see Cluster / Replication.
Watch out A backup contains credentials in clear text (OIDC / PMS / fleet keys and, from
.env, the session secret and the built-in superuser login). Store the file only where trusted administrators can reach it.