Data and backups

What BOAT stores

All persistent data stays on your machine:

• The SQLite database with accounts, projects, classes and annotations
• Project files: images, video frames and exports
• Installed model packages and their weights
• Logs

See where files live for the exact directories.

Back up

boat backup create

BOAT briefly stops the service, archives its data directory (database, projects and model data) and starts again. The archive is named like boat-backup-20260927T101500Z.tar.gz and saved under ~/.local/state/boat/backups; the command prints its path.

boat backup list

For a manual, file-level backup, stop BOAT first so the database is consistent, then archive the whole data directory:

boat stop
tar -czf boat-data.tgz -C ~/.local/share boat
boat start

Restore

Restoring replaces your current data with the archive's contents, so BOAT asks you to confirm:

boat backup restore --yes ~/.local/state/boat/backups/boat-backup-20260927T101500Z.tar.gz

Updates and rollbacks

boat update always backs up before it changes anything:

1. Stop BOAT if it is running.
2. Create a backup.
3. Install the new version and its Python runtime.
4. Start it once to apply and validate database migrations.
5. Switch over, or restore the previous version if any step failed.

If a successful update still misbehaves, return to the exact pre-update state:

boat rollback --yes

Rollback discards newer data. Anything created after the update is lost, which is why the command requires --yes.

Schema changes

Database changes ship as migrations. BOAT upgrades the schema to the latest revision at startup and never alters tables any other way.

Reset everything (development)

In a source checkout, this destructively resets all local development data:

./core/backend/scripts/reset_service.sh