Backup & Restore

An Unbase snapshot (the IR in .unbase/) is a complete, portable, byte-level copy of your database, storage objects, and auth model. That makes it a backup — and Unbase can re-apply it to recover.

Per-project snapshots

The snapshot lives in .unbase/ in the directory you run unbase from, so it's project-specific by default — run unbase in each project and they never collide (like node_modules). unbase init adds .unbase/ to your .gitignore since the snapshot holds dumped data. Relocate it per-run with --out <dir> or UNBASE_IR.

Back up

npx unbase extract --mirror     # snapshot DB + auth + storage bytes into .unbase/

Copy or archive the .unbase/ directory somewhere safe. The manifest records the project label and timestamp so multiple snapshots stay identifiable.

Restore

npx unbase restore              # create schema + load + verify, then auth

restore re-applies a snapshot to the target in your .env/config (it implies --create-schema, so it works against an empty database). To restore files too, run unbase storage then unbase rewrite (these need your storage credentials).