Back up a user or team

You can make a backup of a single user or a single team from the admin panel. The backup is one archive file that holds everything in that account: files, mail, documents, and settings. It covers one user or one team at a time, not the whole server.

Only admins can do this. The Backup section lives inside a user's or a team's detail pane, so you start by opening the account you want to back up.

Create a backup

1. Go to Admin.
2. Open Users and pick a user, or open Teams and pick a team. Their detail pane opens on the right.
3. Scroll to the Backup section.
4. Click Create backup.

The backup runs in the background, so you can keep working. The section shows its progress while it runs: first Creating backup, then Verifying archive, each with the current step and a progress bar. When it finishes, you see Backup created with the name of the new archive, and the archive appears in the list below.

Each archive is one file named home-<id>-<date>.tar.zst. Its row shows the date and size, and a badge:

• Verified: the archive passed every check and is ready to restore.
• Not verified: the archive has not been checked yet.
• Failed: a check found a problem. The row lists what went wrong and keeps the file, but offers no restore, so make a fresh backup.

Only one backup or restore can run per user or per team at a time. If a job is already running, Create backup stays disabled until it finishes.

Download an archive

Hover over an archive row and click Download. The file downloads to your computer. Keep it encrypted and somewhere safe, since it holds all of that account's data.

Verify an archive

Every backup is checked once when it is created. To check an existing archive again, hover over its row and click Verify. This is useful for an archive you uploaded from another machine, which arrives unchecked.

For what verification looks at, see What a backup contains.

Upload an archive

If you have a backup file from another machine, you can bring it back in.

1. In the Backup section, click Upload backup.
2. Choose the archive file.

The file must be up to about 1 GB, and its name must match the pattern this server uses for that user or team. A file that arrives this way lists as Not verified, so click Verify afterwards.

For a file larger than 1 GB, copy it into the server's backups folder by hand instead. That folder is set by EIGEN_BACKUPS_DIR, or it is a backups folder next to the data directory if that variable is not set. The archive appears in the list once it is in place.

Delete an archive

Hover over an archive row and click Delete, then confirm. This removes the file for good. If a user or team has no archives, the section shows No backups yet.

To put an account back from an archive, see Restore a user or team.