Backups

Encrypted backups of every app's settings and databases — scheduled, and restored without touching anything live.

What a backup contains

A config backup holds every app's settings and databases, HomeBox's own state, and the generated passwords. It does not include your photo library or media files — those are far larger, and usually better protected by the disk or NAS they live on.

Artwork, caches and logs that apps download or rebuild by themselves are left out. Restore a backup and the app's database and settings come back; the app fetches the rest again on its own.

Every backup is encrypted before it is written.

Keep the key somewhere else

Backups are encrypted with HB_BACKUP_KEY in /opt/homebox/.env. Without that key a backup cannot be opened — by anyone, including you. If the disk dies, the key dies with it. Copy it into your password manager now.

Take one, or schedule them

In Settings → Backup, press Create backup, or turn on a schedule: every day, every Sunday, or on the 1st of the month, at 02:00. Choose how many to keep; the oldest are removed first. Scheduling is off until you turn it on.

From a terminal:

sudo homebox backup     # take a config backup now
homebox backups         # list them

Restore

A restore decrypts and unpacks a backup into a separate folder. It does not overwrite anything live, so you can take out exactly the file or app you need:

sudo homebox restore homebox-config-20260914_020000.tar.gz.enc

The files land in /opt/homebox/restore-<date>. Stop the app, copy its folder back into /opt/homebox/modules/<app>/config, and start it again.

Get a copy out of the house

A backup on the same disk does not survive that disk. Download backups from the dashboard, or install Duplicati to send encrypted copies to a NAS or cloud storage automatically.