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Restore an App From a Backup

Every app you run is backed up once a day, into storage that belongs to you. If an app breaks, or you delete something you wanted, you can put it back yourself without waiting for a human.

What gets backed up

Each app writes a dated backup into your own backup volume:

/storage/backup/<app>/2026-09-08_<something>.gz

You can browse these in FileBrowser, the same as any other file you own. What is inside depends on the app: a database dump for apps that keep a database, or an archive of the app's configuration for apps that keep flat files.

Backups are kept for about a week. A few apps with very large databases keep fewer copies, because the backup volume is shared with every other app you run.

This is the everyday rollback, not the whole safety net

ElfHosted also keeps its own disaster recovery backups of your storage. Those exist for the case where a volume is lost entirely. The backups described on this page are the quick, self service kind: one app, one date, no waiting.

Restoring

From the app panel

  1. Find the app in your ElfBot dashboard
  2. Open the ... menu, then Advanced, then Restore Backup
  3. Pick a date from the list. Only dates that actually exist are offered
  4. Type the app name to confirm

By asking Sam

Ask Sam what backups you have for an app, then ask it to restore one. Sam will show you the dates it can see and ask you to confirm before anything happens.

Either way the app restarts, so give it a minute or two to come back.

A restore replaces your current data

The app goes back to how it was on the date you pick. Anything added since then is gone. If you are not sure whether restoring is the right move, it usually is not: see when not to restore below.

If you restore the wrong date

Before touching anything, a restore saves a snapshot of what the app looks like right now. You will see it in the backup folder alongside the others:

pre-restore-20260908-053232_<something>.gz

That snapshot appears in the restore list too, labelled as a snapshot. So if you pick the wrong date, restore the snapshot and you are back where you started. The snapshots are kept separately from the daily backups, and the newest three are kept: older ones are removed as new snapshots are taken.

Things worth knowing

Files added after the backup may survive. For apps whose backup is an archive of files rather than a database, restoring unpacks the backup over the top of what is there. Files that existed at backup time are put back, but files created since are left alone. If you need a truly clean state, delete the unwanted files yourself after restoring.

Media is not in these backups. Anything on your rclone storage, and any media library held outside an app's configuration, is not part of an app backup. These cover the app's own data: its database, its settings, its library index.

For Radarr, Sonarr, Prowlarr and Lidarr, do not rely on the app's own Backup feature

Those apps run on PostgreSQL on ElfHosted, while their built in backup only knows how to save a SQLite database. The file it produces is under a kilobyte and contains a configuration file and nothing else. Restoring it inside the app looks like it worked and recovers none of your movies, series, indexers, quality profiles or history.

Use the ElfHosted backup described on this page instead. It contains the actual database.

When not to restore

A restore is the right tool when data is lost or corrupted. It is the wrong tool for most other problems, because it throws away everything since the backup date to fix something a smaller action would have fixed.

Try these first:

Symptom Better first move
App will not start Restart it, and check its logs
A setting is wrong Change the setting
App is slow or out of space Check your storage usage, clear caches
App is behaving oddly after an update Restart, then ask in Discord

If none of that helps and you have actually lost data, restore.

Getting help

Ask Sam first: it can list your backups, tell you what an app stores, and run the restore for you. If something looks wrong with a backup itself, for example a date you expected is missing, bring it to Discord and we will take a look.