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Backup and restore

A backup is a complete copy of your book at one moment — every account, transaction, holding, setting, memory and conversation. If something goes wrong (a mistake, a bad import, a bug), you can put the whole book back the way it was.

Backups are for rolling this book back. To move your book to another computer or install, use an export instead.

Set up backups

Daily backups are on by default. To check or change them:

  1. Open Settings → Data.
  2. Under Automatic backups:
    • Back up daily — leave it on. The backup runs once a day at about 3:30 in the morning (the clock of the computer running Open Net Worth).
    • Keep for (days) — how long to keep backups (default 30, anything from 1 to 365). Older ones are deleted automatically the next time a backup runs.
  3. Click Back up now to take one immediately. The line underneath shows Last backup and how many are kept, and the new backup appears in the Restore from a backup list.

Only runs while the app is running. If Open Net Worth isn’t running at 3:30 am (or within an hour after), that day’s backup is skipped. On a laptop that sleeps overnight, either keep it awake, or click Back up now now and then — especially before a big import or cleanup.

You can also take a backup from a terminal in a source checkout with make backup (it shows up labelled Automatic).

Where backups are stored

In a backups folder next to your data, on the same computer:

InstallFolder
Desktop appbackups inside your book folder (by default ~/.open-net-worth/backups)
Server (onw, source checkout)~/.open-net-worth/backups
Docker/home/onw/.open-net-worth/backups inside the open-net-worth-data volume

Each one is a .zip named by the time it was taken (UTC), for example 20261010T033000Z.zip; the ones you take by hand end in -manual.zip.

These backups live on the same disk as your book. To protect against losing the computer, also keep a copy somewhere else — see the next section.

Keep a copy somewhere else

In Settings → Data → Restore from a backup, click Download next to a backup. The downloaded file has every credential removed — your login, API token, connector passwords and keys, and AI provider key are deleted from it before it leaves the server — so it’s safe to keep in cloud storage or on a USB drive.

For moving to a new computer, an export (Export backup (.zip) on the same screen) is the file you need — a downloaded backup can’t be loaded through the app (see below).

Restore a backup

  1. Open Settings → Data and find the backup in Restore from a backup (each row shows its date, Manual or Automatic, and its size).
  2. Click Restore….
  3. Read the confirmation — “Restore the backup from …?” — then click Restore this backup.
  4. The app reloads with your book as it was at that moment. Anything added since then is gone.

Before restoring, the app takes a fresh backup of your current book (it appears in the list labelled Manual), so if you picked the wrong one you can restore that and be back where you started.

What a restore does and doesn’t change

Your book goes back: accounts, transactions, holdings, budget, settings, memory, chat history and Automation run history all match the backup.

These stay exactly as they are now, whichever backup you restore:

  • your login password and API token,
  • every connector’s credentials and your AI provider key,
  • your tool permissions and approval decisions,
  • the audit trail of changes, and the list of apps connected to your book.

So an old backup can’t lock you out, bring back a permission you revoked, or erase the record of how your data got here — and you never re-enter credentials after a restore.

Each book also carries an invisible identity that changes whenever the data is reset or replaced (a backup restore, an import). A browser tab that was open on the old book notices the change the next time it talks to the app, forgets its saved conversation list and cached screens, and reloads, so you never see the previous book’s conversations on the new one. Preferences such as theme and panel sizes are kept.

Things that can trip you up

  • “Restore from a file instead…” is not a backup restore. That button (and Choose import file…) loads an export .zip, replacing your book with it. A downloaded backup is a different kind of file and will be refused there (typically “missing manifest.json”).
  • A downloaded backup can’t be uploaded back. Restore only works with backups already in this install’s backups folder.
  • PostgreSQL installs: the backup covers the files in your data folder but not the database itself. Back up the database with your own tools (for example pg_dump).
  • Other automatic copies. Before updating its database the app keeps a separate copy in data/backups/db/ — see Upgrading. These, and the copy taken before a Reset instance, don’t appear in the restore list.