Backups

Better-PaaS keeps important state — its database, your admin token, the encryption key, and logs — in a data/ directory. Backups let you snapshot that state so you can recover from mistakes or move to a new server.

What gets backed up

A backup is a snapshot of the control plane's data/ directory, which holds:

• The SQLite database (your apps, settings, deploy history)
• Tokens and the encryption key
• Persisted logs

On-demand backups

Scheduled backups

The easiest way to automate backups is from the Backups screen: turn on Run backups automatically, set the interval in hours, and choose how many recent backups to keep. Old backups beyond that count are pruned automatically.

You can also set a schedule through the backend environment, which is handy for provisioning a server before the dashboard is up:

# Take a snapshot every 6 hours; keeps the last 10 automatically.
BACKUP_INTERVAL_HOURS=6

When set above 0, Better-PaaS auto-snapshots data/ every N hours and retains the most recent 10 backups, pruning older ones.

Storage options

Backups can also be configured for off-server storage from the Backups screen. Toggle on offsite storage and enter your S3-compatible bucket details (AWS S3, Cloudflare R2, MinIO) — bucket, region, endpoint, and credentials. Each new backup is then uploaded to your bucket, so a snapshot lives somewhere other than the server it's protecting. Use the Test button to confirm your storage credentials work before relying on them.

The same screen also has the automatic backup controls — turn on a schedule, set the interval, and choose how many recent backups to keep.

Restoring

To restore, stop Better-PaaS, replace the data/ directory with the contents of a backup archive, and start it again. Because schema migrations are additive and applied on boot, a backup from an older version restores cleanly into a newer one.

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