Backup & Restore

Your entire Beacon setup — every field you’ve filled in, every photo you’ve uploaded, every tile and card you’ve configured — lives in your Beacon project folder on your computer. Backup & Restore lets you save all of that as a single .zip file and bring it back later, on the same machine or a different one.

Find it in the wizard’s left menu, between Docs and Verify & Build.

What’s in the bundle

Each export is a .zip file named beacon-YYYY-MM-DD.zip containing:

• Your full configuration — every field, toggle, and choice from every section of the wizard.
• Your wizard-uploaded images — avatar, social-share image, custom favicons, tile artwork, fallback images.
• A small manifest that tells Beacon how to read the bundle on import.

The bundle does not include things that ship with Beacon itself (the default favicon, sample images, the Beacon logo). It also doesn’t include build output — when you import and rebuild, those are regenerated from your configuration.

A note on credentials

The bundle contains your full configuration, including any API keys or tokens you’ve entered (Last.fm, Hardcover, Steam, Trakt, and so on). This is intentional — without them, you couldn’t restore a working site.

Treat your beacon-*.zip as private. It’s the same trust class as the configuration file the wizard already maintains on your machine. Don’t email it, post it publicly, or hand it to someone you wouldn’t hand your passwords to.

Exporting

In the wizard’s Backup section, click Export. Beacon assembles the bundle and your browser downloads it. Save it somewhere safe — an external drive, a private cloud folder, a password-protected archive.

Importing

In the same Backup section, drag a beacon-*.zip onto the import area (or click to choose a file). Beacon validates the bundle, runs any needed schema updates so older bundles import cleanly into newer Beacon versions, then replaces your current configuration and images with what’s in the bundle. The wizard reloads after a successful import, so the form reflects the imported config immediately.

If anything in the bundle is invalid, the import is cancelled and your existing setup is left untouched.

Use cases

• Backups. Export periodically and save the file somewhere safe. If your computer dies, your Beacon goes with it — unless you have a recent backup.
• Multiple Beacon sites. Keep separate bundles for separate sites. Export one, import another to switch contexts. Each bundle is the complete state for one site.
• Moving to a new computer. Export from the old one, copy the bundle over, import into a fresh Beacon install on the new machine.
• Restoring across versions. A bundle exported from an older Beacon imports cleanly into a newer one. Schema updates run automatically.

If you import the wrong bundle

Every import writes a backup of your existing configuration to a timestamped file in your Beacon folder before applying changes. If you imported the wrong bundle, you can recover manually:

1. Close the wizard.
2. Open the setup/ folder in your Beacon project.
3. Look for files named state.json.bak.*. Each one is a backup from a previous import; the timestamp in the filename tells you when it was made.
4. Replace setup/state.json with the backup you want to restore (rename the desired backup to state.json).
5. Restart the wizard.

There’s no automatic UI for this yet. If you find yourself doing it often, let us know.

Limitations

• Bundles are not portable across forks. If you’ve modified Beacon’s source to add a new field, your bundle includes that field. Importing it into stock Beacon (or a differently-modified fork) will fail validation. The version-update path only handles official Beacon version differences.
• Bundles aren’t designed for sharing between people. Validation passes for any structurally-valid bundle, but the bundle contains the original creator’s credentials. Sharing a bundle gives the recipient those credentials. If you want to give someone a starting point, build a fresh setup for them — don’t hand them yours.