Manual · The book

# Backups & restore

Automatic copies, packages, passwords — and what a restore really does.

## The package

A backup is a `.neuridionbackup` package: a folder the Finder shows as one object, holding `data.sqlite`, `files.sqlite` and a `manifest.json` written for humans. The ten-year promise lives in that shape — inside are ordinary SQLite files under obvious names, readable by any tool that speaks SQLite, whether or not Neuridion is still around. Right-click, Show Package Contents, and there they are.

## Automatic, rotated, cheap

Copies happen by themselves once something changed; the newest n are kept — and never fewer than one, whatever the number says. On APFS the documents are cloned when nothing moved: ten backups of three gigabytes of scans cost three, not thirty, and every package stays independently restorable.

How long ago the last copy was taken, said in words — and the sentence that a copy beside the data protects against a mistake, not against a disk. (Shown on the server; a single-user application carries the same machinery.)

## Where they go, and the honest failure

The folder is chosen on the machine (never a project setting — a path is about one Mac). A copy beside the data protects against a mistake, not against a failed disk — the window says so, and when the chosen folder cannot be reached it tells you the copies are landing locally instead of failing silently: believing your data left the machine when it did not is the worst outcome a backup can have.

## A password of its own

A backup can carry its own password — for the copy that leaves the house on a stick or a NAS. Restoring asks for it; the application's own key never travels.

## Restore is a restart

Restoring first takes a safety copy of the present, then the application ends and begins on the restored data — an open window over replaced data would be a lie. Refusals come first: a backup from a different application, or a newer schema than the application understands, is refused with the reason, and half a package (records without their documents) is refused rather than restored hollow. On a running server, restore is a ceremony of its own — see Client / Server.