Everything that makes your assistant yours — its configuration, the API keys and logins it uses, its chat sessions, and its workspace — lives inside the private virtual machine (VM) HolaClaw runs on your Mac. A backup is a single snapshot of that state, stored as a file on your Mac, that you can keep or restore later.
HolaClaw takes backups automatically, and you can also take one yourself at any time from the assistant's Backups view.
What's in a backup
A backup captures your assistant's state at a moment in time. You choose how much to include with the scope:
- Everything (the default) — the OpenClaw configuration, the credentials and API keys, your chat sessions, and the workspace. This is a full snapshot you can restore to get the assistant back exactly as it was.
- Config only — just the active OpenClaw configuration file. Credentials, sessions, and the workspace are left out. Handy for keeping a small record of how the assistant is set up without copying its data.
Whether to keep the workspace (usually the largest part of a backup) and whether to keep only the config are independent choices — a future release will let you skip the workspace while still backing up everything else. Today the two options above are the ones you can pick.
Note A backup never leaves your Mac. HolaClaw has no servers in this loop — your backups, like your assistant, stay local.
Where backups live on your Mac
Backups are stored per assistant, next to that assistant's VM state, under:
~/.local/share/holaclaw/vf-vms/<vm-name>/backups/
Inside that folder you'll find:
index.json— the catalog of backups for this assistant: one record per snapshot, with its id, name, scope, size, when it was taken, and whether it was a manual or automatic backup. The Backups view reads this file to show your list.<id>.tar.gz— the snapshot archives themselves. Each backup is a single gzip-compressed tar archive named after its id. This is the file that holds the actual captured state.
You normally don't need to touch these files — manage backups from the app — but knowing the layout helps if you ever want to copy a backup archive somewhere safe yourself.
Automatic backups
By default, HolaClaw takes a daily automatic backup of each running assistant and keeps the most recent few, pruning older automatic backups beyond the retention limit so they don't pile up. Manual backups you take yourself are never pruned automatically — they're kept until you delete them.
Automatic backups run from a background service that follows each assistant's VM, so they keep happening whether or not the desktop app is open. You can change the frequency (including turning automatic backups off) and the retention count per assistant in its backup settings.
Restoring a backup
HolaClaw orchestrates the restore from your Mac (the host) rather than asking the assistant to restore itself. When you restore a backup, HolaClaw:
- Stops the assistant and moves its current live state aside (it isn't deleted yet).
- Loads the snapshot archive onto the VM.
- Installs the OpenClaw version the snapshot was taken with, if it differs from the one running now.
- Extracts the snapshot over the live state and starts the assistant back up.
- Waits for the assistant to come back and checks that it's healthy.
If every step succeeds, the restore is complete and the moved-aside copy is cleaned up. If anything goes wrong — the archive won't extract, the assistant doesn't come back healthy, or any other step fails — HolaClaw rolls back: it puts the moved-aside state back exactly as it was, so a failed restore never leaves your assistant in a half-restored state. It also keeps the logs from the attempt so you can see why it failed (and download them from the restore dialog).