# Backups

Backups are your safety net. They ensure that your work, configuration, and environment state can be restored if anything goes wrong.

Genie provides both automatic and manual backup options, giving you control over how your data is protected.

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## What Gets Backed Up

Backups capture the state of your workspace, including:

* All files in your working directory
* Installed package lists
* Environment variables stored in Secrets
* Scheduled tasks and cron jobs
* Server configuration

This means you can restore your entire environment to a previous state, not just individual files.

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## Automatic Backups

Once enabled, Genie creates backups on a regular schedule without any action required from you.

You can choose the frequency that fits your workflow:

* Daily for standard usage
* Every 12 hours for active development
* Every 6 hours for critical environments

The number of backups retained depends on your plan. Older backups are automatically removed to manage storage.

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## Manual Backups

You can create a backup at any time from your settings or terminal.

Manual backups are useful before major changes such as deployments, framework upgrades, or experimental modifications.

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## Restoring from a Backup

If something goes wrong, you can restore your environment to any available backup.

The restore process replaces your current workspace with the backed-up state. This includes files, configuration, and installed packages.

Restoring typically takes a few minutes depending on the size of your data.

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## Downloading Backups

You can download any backup as a compressed archive for local storage.

This is useful for:

* Maintaining an external copy of your data
* Migrating to a different environment
* Long-term archival

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## Best Practices

* Enable automatic backups on your first day
* Create a manual backup before any major change
* Download critical backups to local storage
* Use version control (Git) alongside backups for code
* Test a restore occasionally to verify your backups work