backup

What This Skill Does

The Backup skill for OpenClaw provides a comprehensive solution for disaster recovery, system migration, and data preservation. It is designed to handle the entire lifecycle of your OpenClaw environment by creating encrypted snapshots of your local directory, including configurations, workspace memory, and custom skills. By utilizing professional tools like GPG for encryption and tar for archiving, the skill ensures that sensitive credentials and agent memories remain secure at rest. It supports both local storage and multiple cloud destinations, including S3, R2, B2, GCS, and Google Drive, making it easy to keep offsite copies for emergency recovery.

Installation

To integrate this skill, use the ClawHub CLI tool in your terminal: clawhub install openclaw/skills/skills/ryanedick/backup-and-restore. Ensure that you have gpg and tar installed on your host machine. For cloud functionality, you will need to install the corresponding CLI tools (e.g., aws, gsutil, or rclone). After installation, follow the guided setup by running the interactive scripts, which will help you configure your BACKUP_PASSPHRASE and link your cloud storage providers.

Use Cases

This skill is essential for users who want to prevent data loss due to hardware failure or accidental configuration errors. It is also the primary mechanism for migrating an existing OpenClaw agent to a new machine—simply take a full backup on your old device and restore it on the new one. Developers can use the workspace-only restoration feature to reset their agent's brain while keeping their environmental credentials intact, or to sync their agent's current state between development, staging, and production environments.

Example Prompts

1. "OpenClaw, please perform a full system backup and push it to my configured S3 bucket."
2. "I'm moving to a new server; how do I restore my entire OpenClaw configuration from the latest backup?"
3. "Can you run a workspace-only backup? I want to save my current progress before I experiment with these new skills."

Tips & Limitations

The tool generates two distinct file types: full backups and workspace-only backups. Always prioritize keeping your BACKUP_PASSPHRASE secure, as data encrypted with GPG cannot be recovered if the passphrase is lost. Be aware that the backup process may trigger a temporary stop of the OpenClaw gateway to ensure file consistency; however, you can toggle this behavior using the BACKUP_STOP_GATEWAY environment variable if you are running automated tests. Regularly auditing your cloud storage buckets is recommended to ensure that the retention policies align with your data privacy requirements.