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Export and Backup

Backup & Restore

Create backups of your pinakea state and restore them later.

What Backup & Restore is

Backup & Restore creates a snapshot of pinakea’s current state so you can return to it later.

This is useful before:

  • making major settings changes
  • importing a lot of data
  • troubleshooting issues

Where to find it

Go to:

Settings → Maintenance → Backup & Restore

What’s included

Backups are designed to capture pinakea’s app state, including:

  • your pinakea database (sources.db) and the items inside it
  • AI-generated metadata (summaries, titles, tags, embeddings)
  • your app settings (including per‑Set settings)
  • credentials payload (keychain.json) used during restore:
    • Feedbin credentials
    • (optional) your OpenRouter API key, only if you enable Include OpenRouter API key in backups

OpenRouter and Feedbin credentials are stored locally in macOS Keychain during normal app use. Backup inclusion of the OpenRouter key remains opt-in.

What’s not included (by design)

  • Your original files for Folder and Obsidian sources (pinakea reads those from disk)
  • Downloaded local AI model files (Mixed mode models)
  • macOS permissions (you may need to re‑grant access to folders after restoring)

Restore behavior (important)

Restoring a backup requires pinakea to restart:

  1. You choose a backup to restore.
  2. pinakea creates a safety backup of your current state first.
  3. pinakea quits and applies the restore on the next launch.

OpenRouter key safety during restore:

  • If you choose to preserve your existing OpenRouter key (or the backup does not include one), pinakea keeps your current key.
  • If you include and restore an OpenRouter key from backup, that backup key becomes the active key.

Automatic backup before AI tag consolidation

When you run AI → Consolidate AI Tags… and confirm apply, pinakea creates an automatic backup first.

  • Backup kind: tagConsolidation
  • Backup note: Automatic backup before tag consolidation

This gives you a rollback point before any AI-tag replacements are written.

Browser Clips safety and recovery

Browser Clips are special because they are ingested into pinakea (there isn’t a separate “source file” you manage yourself).

pinakea therefore provides two layers of safety:

  • Backups (this page)
  • A Browser Clips export/import feature (portable Markdown) and a built‑in recovery sync after restores

If you want a portable copy of your clipped pages, use Browser Clips export/import in Settings → Maintenance → Browser Clips.

Reset or uninstall local state

For a clean reinstall or a full local reset, pinakea provides a standalone uninstall script: scripts/uninstall_pinakea.sh.

Use it with --dry-run to review what would be removed. Use --state-only when you want to keep the app bundle but remove local state, defaults, Keychain entries, browser connector manifests, saved state, caches, and support folders.

Run reset commands from the macOS user account you want to reset. Per-account state removal is isolated to that account. Full mode without --state-only can also remove /Applications/pinakea.app, which is shared by all macOS user accounts on the Mac.

The script quits pinakea and its helpers before removing state, so the app cannot rewrite settings while it exits.

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