Openclaw Backup

Encrypted backup and restore for OpenClaw agents. Two-tier archives: operational data safe for cloud storage, secrets encrypted with age for local recovery. Manifest verification with SHA-256 checksums. Atomic restore with staging, health checks, and auto-rollback. GitHub push with secrets protection. Daily scheduled backups. Use when setting up disaster recovery, backing up your agent, restoring from backup, or pushing archives to GitHub.

🔐 Agent Backup

One command to backup. One command to restore. Everything encrypted, verified, and rollback-safe.

Quick Start

# Backup (operational only — safe for cloud)
bash {baseDir}/scripts/backup.sh

# Backup with encrypted secrets
bash {baseDir}/scripts/backup.sh --include-secrets --age-recipient age1...

# Verify
bash {baseDir}/scripts/verify.sh --manifest <path>/manifest.json --archive <path>/backup.tar.gz

# Restore (dry-run first)
bash {baseDir}/scripts/restore.sh --manifest <path>/manifest.json --archive <path>/backup.tar.gz --dry-run

# Restore for real
bash {baseDir}/scripts/restore.sh --manifest <path>/manifest.json --archive <path>/backup.tar.gz

# Push to GitHub (operational only, secrets blocked if unencrypted)
bash {baseDir}/scripts/push-to-github.sh --manifest <path>/manifest.json --archive <path>/backup.tar.gz

# Schedule daily 4 AM backups
bash {baseDir}/scripts/schedule.sh

Two-Tier Archive Model

Tier	Contents	Cloud safe?	Encrypted?
Operational	Workspace, redacted config, crons	✅ Yes	No (no secrets)
Secrets	.env, agent auth profiles	❌ Local only	✅ Required (age)

Default: operational only. Secrets are opt-in via --include-secrets.

Restore Safety

Restore uses a 7-step safety flow:

1. Verify manifest checksums
2. Extract to staging (not live directory)
3. Verify critical files in staging
4. Backup current state to .pre-restore-backup-TIMESTAMP
5. Atomic swap
6. Health check (pre-restart-check.sh if available)
7. Auto-rollback on failure

Flags: --dry-run (preview only), --force (non-interactive)

Prerequisites

• age for secrets encryption: brew install age or apt install age
• gh for GitHub push (optional): brew install gh

Configuration

Set encryption via environment or flags:

# Environment
export AGE_RECIPIENT="age1your_public_key"
export AGE_PASSPHRASE_FILE="/path/to/passphrase"

# Or flags
bash {baseDir}/scripts/backup.sh --include-secrets --age-recipient age1...

Workflows

• bash {baseDir}/scripts/weekly-verify.sh — verify all backup sets, prune by daily/weekly/monthly retention, and clean orphaned files.
• bash {baseDir}/scripts/monthly-drill.sh — run a dry-run restore against the newest backup set and report pass/fail.
• bash {baseDir}/scripts/pre-change-snapshot.sh — create a fast operational-only snapshot before config edits or gateway restarts.
• .github/workflows/verify-backup.yml — GitHub Actions CI that builds a fixture backup, validates manifest checksums, extracts the archive, and checks critical files.

Reference Files

• {baseDir}/references/restore-guide.md — full disaster recovery walkthrough
• {baseDir}/references/what-to-backup.md — every file explained
• {baseDir}/references/retention-policy.md — how long to keep backups