Backups

EmDash gives you three layers of protection for your content, from zero-config point-in-time recovery on Cloudflare to downloadable archives you keep yourself.

What’s in a backup

A backup contains everything needed to reconstruct your site’s content:

• All content entries, including drafts, scheduled posts, and trashed items
• Collection and field definitions (your content model)
• Taxonomies and term assignments
• Menus, widgets, sections, and SEO settings
• Revisions and media metadata
• Site settings (title, tagline, display preferences)

Backups deliberately exclude:

• User accounts, sessions, passkeys, and API tokens — auth data is neither portable nor safe in a downloadable file
• Secrets (preview signing secret, plugin configuration)
• Media binaries — the actual files live in your storage bucket (R2, S3, or local); a backup carries their metadata so references stay intact

Backups are JSON files in the same snapshot format used by EmDash’s preview system, versioned with the EmDash release that created them.

One-click download

Under Settings → Backups in the admin, the Download backup button generates a fresh backup and downloads it as a JSON file. Requires the admin role.

This is the right tool before risky operations: bulk imports, schema changes, or major upgrades.

Automatic backups to storage

If your site has a storage backend configured (R2 on Cloudflare, S3, or local storage), you can enable daily automatic backups:

1. Open Settings → Backups in the admin.

2. Toggle Daily automatic backups on.

3. Choose how many backups to keep (1–30). Older archives are pruned automatically.

4. Save. Backups run as part of EmDash’s scheduled maintenance — no extra cron setup needed.

Archives are stored under the backups/ prefix in your bucket as emdash-backup-<timestamp>-<random>.json. The Stored Backups list in the admin lets you download or delete individual archives, and Back up now creates one on demand.

Caution

Archives share the bucket with your media files. EmDash’s media route refuses to serve anything under backups/, and archive names carry a random suffix — but if you expose the bucket itself through a public R2 domain or CDN, anything in it is reachable by URL. Prefer serving media through EmDash (or scope your public domain to the media prefix).

Automatic backups piggyback on the scheduled maintenance tick (the same mechanism that powers scheduled publishing) — on Cloudflare this is the Worker’s cron trigger, on Node the built-in scheduler. If your deployment has no cron trigger configured, use Back up now or the download button instead.

Point-in-time restore with D1 Time Travel

If your site runs on Cloudflare D1, you already have full database point-in-time recovery — always on, no configuration:

# See the current bookmark (do this before risky operations)
npx wrangler d1 time-travel info my-database

# Restore the database to a specific timestamp
npx wrangler d1 time-travel restore my-database --timestamp=2026-07-08T13:00:00Z

Time Travel keeps 30 days of history on the paid plan (7 days on free) with minute-level granularity. It restores the entire database — content, users, settings — which makes it the right tool for disaster recovery (“the import went wrong, take me back to an hour ago”).

See the D1 Time Travel documentation for details.

Tip

Time Travel and EmDash backups complement each other: Time Travel is your disaster-recovery net for the last 30 days; downloaded backups are user-holdable archives with no expiry that survive account or database deletion.

Offsite database dumps

For a complete SQL dump of the raw database (including users and auth tables), use Wrangler:

npx wrangler d1 export my-database --remote --output=backup.sql

On Node deployments, the database is a single SQLite file — copy it while the server is stopped, or use sqlite3 emdash.db ".backup backup.db" for a consistent online copy.

Restoring a backup

Restoring from a backup JSON is intentionally not exposed as a one-click admin action yet — overwriting a live database deserves more friction than a button. Current options:

• Cloudflare: use D1 Time Travel (above) for point-in-time restore.
• Full dumps: import a wrangler d1 export dump with npx wrangler d1 execute my-database --remote --file=backup.sql.
• Backup JSON: the format matches EmDash’s snapshot format; a guided CLI restore is planned. Track Discussion #142.