Backup and restore

A BudMinder backup consolidates your complete cultivation environment into a single portable archive: plant profiles, activity notebooks, cultivar libraries, sensor mappings, smoke reports and system settings, plus optional high-resolution photos and historical climate logs. Create backups regularly and store copies off the host server to ensure data safety.

Making a backup

Navigate to Settings → Backup & data → Create Backup.

1. Select how much Sensor History to include: None, 7 days, 30 days, 90 days or Full History. Historical sensor telemetry typically makes up the largest portion of archive size.
2. Check Include images to package your plant photo galleries and camera snapshots.
3. Click Create Backup.

BudMinder generates the archive locally and lists it under Available Backups. Click the download icon to save a copy to your local machine, or click the trash can icon to delete older snapshots.

Tip: Backups stored solely on the host server will be lost if that drive fails. Always download important backups to external or cloud storage.

Restoring a backup

Warning: Restoring an archive overwrites your current BudMinder database entirely. Any entries or modifications logged after the backup was generated will be permanently replaced.

1. Go to Settings → Backup & data → Restore Backup.
2. Drag and drop a BudMinder backup .zip archive into the upload target, or click to select the file from your computer.
3. Click Restore Backup and allow the process to finish. Active sensor polling pauses automatically during the restore.

To migrate BudMinder to a new computer or server, generate a backup on the original machine, install BudMinder on the new hardware and restore the archive there.

If you don't need the sensor history, check Skip sensor data to restore everything else.

SQLite file transfer

Under Advanced: SQLite File Transfer, you can download the raw database file directly (Download .db File) or swap out the active database by uploading an existing file (Replace Database). This provides a fast method for duplicating an entire SQLite installation. Note that raw database transfers do not include media files, which reside separately in the server's uploads folder.

Sensor history

The Data Retention setting specifies how many days of sensor telemetry to retain. Older readings are automatically purged once daily in the background. Setting this value to 0 preserves all historical climate logs indefinitely.

If you run BudMinder in Docker

When deployed via Docker, all persistent application data lives inside two mapped directory volumes: the data volume (/app/data) containing the database and backup archives, and the uploads volume (/app/uploads) containing plant photos and camera captures. Creating a direct copy of both folders while the BudMinder container is stopped produces a full manual system clone.