workspace-backup

What This Skill Does

The workspace-backup skill provides a robust, git-powered solution for version-controlling your OpenClaw environment. By automating the backup of your workspace, skills, memory, and custom configuration to a GitHub repository, it acts as a critical safety net. It utilizes standard Git workflows, ensuring that your data remains structured, history-tracked, and easily recoverable. With built-in support for smart .gitignore files and automated commit messaging, it removes the manual labor typically associated with infrastructure maintenance, making it an essential tool for maintaining operational continuity.

Installation

To install, ensure your environment is ready to handle git operations. Run clawhub install openclaw/skills/skills/aiwithabidi/workspace-backup to add the skill. Navigate to your ~/.openclaw/workspace directory, execute git init, and link your remote repository via git remote add origin <url>. Ensure that your SSH keys are configured correctly on your GitHub account so that the backup.sh script can authenticate without interactive TTY prompts. Finally, register the skill as a cron job to enable periodic, hands-free synchronization.

Use Cases

This skill is perfect for developers and agents maintaining state-heavy configurations. Use it to protect your custom skill logic from accidental deletion, synchronize your agent's evolving memory across different runtime environments, or simply maintain a historical audit log of your agent's workspace state. It is specifically beneficial for production-grade agent setups where recovery time objectives (RTO) must be kept to a minimum in the event of hardware failure or software misconfiguration.

Example Prompts

1. "Run the workspace backup process now to capture the latest changes to my agent skills and memory."
2. "Show me the last 5 commit summaries from the workspace backup to verify what was saved."
3. "Restore the specific configuration file for my email automation skill from the backup history dated two days ago."

Tips & Limitations

Always ensure that sensitive environment variables or API keys are excluded from your commits by verifying the auto-generated .gitignore file; the backup tool is designed to prevent leaking secrets, but manual verification is recommended. The backup script is non-interactive; if your SSH key requires a passphrase, ensure it is added to your ssh-agent prior to execution. For large datasets, note that frequent commits might bloat your repository size, so consider tuning your cron schedule to balance data granularity with performance.