Backup & data — Kerno Docs

Where data lives

Two named volumes hold all state:

postgres_data — Postgres data files. Contains:
- encrypted DB config store (LLM key, Google OAuth, connector tokens, licence key)
- pg-boss job queue + schedule history
- memory_chunks table — pgvector semantic memory
- reactions / conversation metadata
kerno_data — mounted at /app/memory. Contains:
- memory/.encryption-key (0600) — the bootstrap secret that decrypts everything in the DB config store
- daily markdown context files
- conversation history JSON
- soul.md — auto-learnt preferences
- ops metrics + token usage stats

Critical: back up both volumes. Restoring just Postgres without memory/.encryption-key means the encrypted config store is unreadable — you'd have to re-run the wizard.

Backing it up

# Postgres dump (config, conversations, vector memory, job queue)
docker compose exec -T postgres pg_dump -U kerno kerno > kerno-db.sql

# Memory volume tarball (encryption key, daily markdown, ops metrics)
docker run --rm \
  -v kerno_kerno_data:/data \
  -v $(pwd):/backup \
  alpine tar czf /backup/kerno-memory.tar.gz -C /data .

Restoring

# Restore Postgres
cat kerno-db.sql | docker compose exec -T postgres psql -U kerno -d kerno

# Restore memory volume
docker run --rm \
  -v kerno_kerno_data:/data \
  -v $(pwd):/backup \
  alpine tar xzf /backup/kerno-memory.tar.gz -C /data