Backup & Restore

Your world model lives entirely on your machine. Tenure never phones home, which means there is no cloud backup to fall back on. If you value your belief history, export it periodically.

What gets exported

A full export includes active and superseded beliefs, runtime config (including provider keys), persona cache, and compaction history. The UI shows a preview of exactly what will be included before you confirm.

Exporting

Open http://localhost:5757/admin/backup and click Export. You’ll see a preview of what will be included, then the archive downloads directly to your browser’s downloads folder.

For scripted or automated backups, you can also use the API:

curl -X POST http://localhost:5757/v1/backup/export \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $TOKEN" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"passphrase": "my-secure-passphrase"}' \
  --output ~/tenure-backup.enc

The output is a single passphrase-encrypted archive. The raw encryption keys are not included — the archive is safe to store in Dropbox, email to yourself, or put on a USB stick.

Store the passphrase somewhere you won’t lose it. Without it the archive cannot be decrypted.

Restoring

From the UI (recommended)

On the new machine, start Tenure and open http://localhost:5757/admin/backup. Use the Import button to upload your archive and enter your passphrase.

From the API

On Linux and macOS:

ARCHIVE=$(base64 < ~/tenure-backup.enc)
curl -X POST http://localhost:5757/v1/backup/import \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $TOKEN" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d "{\"passphrase\": \"my-secure-passphrase\", \"archive\": \"$ARCHIVE\"}"

On Windows (PowerShell):

$archive = [Convert]::ToBase64String([IO.File]::ReadAllBytes("$env:USERPROFILE\tenure-backup.enc"))
Invoke-RestMethod -Uri "http://localhost:5757/v1/backup/import" `
  -Method Post `
  -Headers @{ Authorization = "Bearer $TOKEN" } `
  -ContentType "application/json" `
  -Body (ConvertTo-Json @{ passphrase = "my-secure-passphrase"; archive = $archive })

Note: For large archives, the UI import is more reliable than the API on Windows. The PowerShell approach above loads the entire archive into memory.

A successful restore returns:

{
  "ok": true,
  "result": {
    "beliefs_imported": 142,
    "beliefs_skipped": 0,
    "compaction_entries_imported": 5,
    "persona_restored": true,
    "config_restored": true
  }
}

A successful restore gives you a fully working instance: beliefs, provider credentials, and persona all intact. No re-onboarding required.

Import is safe to run multiple times — existing beliefs are skipped rather than duplicated.

If you never exported

If your disk fails without a backup, your world model is unrecoverable. Tenure’s encryption means even the raw database files are unreadable without the keys, which lived on the same machine.

The export takes about ten seconds. Do it before anything risky.