Export & Backup

Your vault is yours. You can export the whole thing as a zip at any time, in plain markdown, with no special tooling required to read or restore it later.

Why export

A few reasons people export regularly:

Independent backup. The vault is hosted, but you don't have to rely on that — keeping a local zip on your machine or in your own backup tool is good practice.
Migration confidence. Knowing you can leave whenever you want makes everything else feel less risky.
Archival. A snapshot at a point in time, useful for long-running projects.
Working offline. A local copy of every page lets you reference your vault even if you're somewhere without connectivity.

How to export

From the web app

The export endpoint is part of the API. The simplest path:

Sign in to mindwiki.io.
Mint an API key with read scope at mindwiki.io/account/api-keys if you don't already have one.
Run:

bash

curl -H "Authorization: Bearer $MINDWIKI_API_KEY" \
  -o mindwiki-export.zip \
  "https://api.mindwiki.io/vault/export"

You get a zip containing every page as .md, every attachment in _assets/, and the original folder structure.

From the macOS app

The macOS app keeps a complete local copy of your vault on disk. Your "export" is already there — it's the vault folder you chose when you set up the app. You can zip it any time from Finder, or rsync it to backup storage.

The local vault path is whatever you picked at first launch. The Settings panel lets you change it; the macOS app will move the local files to the new location.

What's in the export

Content	Included
All `.md` pages with frontmatter	Yes
All attachments in `_assets/`	Yes
The folder structure	Yes
Page properties / frontmatter	Yes (inline in each `.md`)
Wikilinks	Yes (preserved as `[[...]]` in body text)
Sync state, device tokens, API keys	No — server-side only
Activity logs and proposals	No — server-side only

The export is exactly the markdown content. Restore it by uploading the files back via API, or simply opening the unzipped folder with the macOS app pointed at it.

Restoring an export

If you need to put exported content back into MindWiki:

Unzip your export.
Open the macOS app and either:

- Choose this folder as your vault location, or

- Drag the files into your existing vault.

The macOS app will sync the content up to the server through the standard push cycle. Existing content in your vault is preserved; restored files merge in by path.

For programmatic restoration, you can iterate the unzipped files and POST each one to POST /vault/page via the REST API. This is useful for selective restoration of specific pages or folders.

Automated backups

If you want a regular automated backup:

bash

# Daily backup script (run via cron)
DATE=$(date +%Y-%m-%d)
curl -H "Authorization: Bearer $MINDWIKI_API_KEY" \
  -o "$HOME/mindwiki-backups/$DATE.zip" \
  "https://api.mindwiki.io/vault/export"

Use a key with read scope only — automated backups never need write access.

Account deletion

If you want to delete your account entirely (not just export), you can do that from the web app at mindwiki.io/account/settings. Deletion is immediate and irreversible — every page, attachment, key, device token, and activity record is removed.

We strongly recommend exporting first.

Where to go next

API Access — the export endpoint and REST API in general
Sync Model — how content stays in sync
Devices — what's tied to a device versus the account