What a backup contains and how it is checked

A backup made from the Backup section in Admin is a single archive of one user or one team. This page lists what goes into that archive, what stays out, how Eigen checks it, and where the panel's limits are. To make or restore a backup, see Back up a user or team and Restore a user or team.

What is in a backup

One archive covers one user or one team, and nothing else on the server.

Item	In the backup?
All files in Drive	Yes
Earlier versions of a file	Yes
Trashed files	Yes
Thumbnails	Yes
Documents, spreadsheets, presentations, drawings, and boards	Yes
Chats	Yes
Mail	Yes (for a user)
Calendars	Yes
Contacts	Yes (for a user)
The account's settings	Yes
The user's profile picture	Yes (for a user)
Who each file is shared with	Yes
Files stored in S3	Yes, downloaded and included in full
Other users or teams	No
Server-wide settings	No
The server's own configuration	No

A team backup is the same shape as a user backup, minus the parts a team has no equivalent for, such as mail and contacts.

The archive file

Detail	Value
Format	.tar.zst, a compressed tar archive you can open with standard tools (tar --zstd)
Name	home-<id>-<date>-<time>.tar.zst, for example home-a1b2c3-20260911-140322.tar.zst
Where it lands	The server's backups folder: EIGEN_BACKUPS_DIR if set, otherwise backups/ next to the data directory

Files stored in an S3 bucket are downloaded and written into the archive, so a restore never depends on the bucket, its credentials, or the storage type staying the same.

How verification works

Eigen checks every archive after it is made, again whenever you click Verify, and once more at the start of every restore. Three checks run in order:

1. Files: every file in the archive has exactly the size and checksum recorded for it, and there is nothing extra.
2. Databases: each of Eigen's own databases passes an integrity check.
3. Documents: a sample of the largest documents is opened and decoded to confirm the content reads back.

Each archive shows one of three badges:

Badge	Meaning
Verified	All three checks passed. You can restore from it.
Failed	A check failed. The archive is kept for reference, but the panel will not restore from it.
Not verified	The archive has not been checked yet. This is normal for one you copied onto the server by hand.

Click Verify on any archive to run the checks again and update its badge.

Limits

Limit	Detail
Scheduling	None. Every backup is started by hand.
Clean-up	None. Old archives and safety copies stay until you delete them.
Whole server	The panel backs up one user or team, not the whole server.
Concurrent jobs	One at a time per user or team. A second request is refused while one runs.
Restore target	An archive restores only to the same user or team it came from.
Upload size	About 1 GB through Upload backup. For a larger archive, copy the file into the backups folder by hand.

Whole-server backup

The panel covers one user or team at a time. To back up the whole server, run ./eigen backup in the install folder on the server. It stops Eigen, saves the whole data directory plus the production environment file as one snapshot in the snapshots/ folder of the install folder, and starts Eigen again. ./eigen backup --light saves only the databases and settings, leaving out files and mail, and has light in its name. Then it deletes all but the three newest snapshots of that kind, so light ones never push out the last full one. Eigen is down while the snapshot is written, and the snapshot is not verified. Only the owner of the install folder can read a snapshot. It leaves out mail still waiting to be sent, the web server's certificates (which the server gets again), the backups/ folder with the archives this panel makes, and docker-compose.override.yml. ./eigen restore checks a snapshot before it stops Eigen, puts it back, and keeps the data it replaces aside. A light snapshot puts back only the databases and settings, and leaves files and mail as they are.

Use ./eigen backup for disaster recovery of the entire server. Use the Backup panel when you want a verified copy of a single user or team, or a restore that does not take the server down.