Backups & Data Export

Every Sarudo instance takes a full backup at 03:00 server time every day. Each backup is a single compressed archive containing a full snapshot of your entire database, your configuration files and secrets, your full capability and tool configuration, the local knowledge store on disk, and any per-instance config on your server. In one file, that is everything needed to reconstruct your instance from a clean base image. Backups are written to your dedicated server and are automatically retained for 30 days — anything older is deleted to keep the backup directory from growing forever.

Before a risky operation — a major workflow change, a bulk CRM import, a schema migration, anything where you want a fresh snapshot you can roll back to — you can trigger a backup on demand. Ask your AI employee "take a backup" and it calls the admin endpoint, runs a fresh database snapshot, and reports back with the backup filename, timestamp, and size. One important detail: the on-demand backup captures the database, not the full snapshot — if you need the full config + capability + knowledge snapshot, say so explicitly and your AI employee will use the full-backup script instead of the quick database-snapshot path.

You can check the backup directory status at any time. "Show me the backup status" returns the latest backup filename, the total count of backups retained, and the disk usage of the backup directory. If you have a specific old backup you want to remove before the 30-day retention clock naturally expires it (for example, to free disk space after a particularly large one-off backup), your AI employee can delete a specific file by name. The retention cron keeps running regardless — so you do not need to prune manually as routine maintenance.

Restoring is a support operation, not a self-service one. The reasoning: a restore is destructive — it overwrites current state with an older snapshot — and doing it correctly means pausing the live services, applying the restore in the right order (schema first, then data, then file assets), and restarting cleanly. If you need one, contact the support team with the backup filename you want (use "list my backups" to find it), a description of what you are trying to recover, and whether you want a full restore or just a specific table or section of data. It is billed against a support block like any other work; a straightforward restore is usually an hour or two of one.

You own all of your data, as stated in the Ownership section of Security & Privacy. If you ever want a full copy of everything your Sarudo instance has — whether for compliance, for archival, or because you are migrating off Sarudo — contact the setup team. The export is a single encrypted archive containing a SQL dump of the database, every uploaded document, every generated artifact (meeting transcripts, Google Doc references, blog drafts), every capability and configuration file, and a summary manifest that maps the structure. You provide a public key, we encrypt to it, and you have a complete portable copy of the instance.