Backup & Restore

The Snapshot skill adds encrypted, versioned backups to your OpenClaw agent. Your entire ~/.openclaw folder gets compressed, encrypted, and pushed to a private GitHub repo — restore it on any machine with one conversation.

What You'll Need

• An XO Workspace with OpenClaw deployed
• A private GitHub repository to store backups
• A GitHub personal access token — either a classic token with repo scope or a fine-grained token with Contents permission (read and write) on the backup repo
• A strong passphrase for encryption

Set Up the Skill

Back Up Your Agent

Tell your agent to back up. No commands to memorise — natural language works:

• "Take a backup of the OpenClaw"
• "Use snapshot to back up my workspace"
• "Save a snapshot of my agent"

The agent compresses your ~/.openclaw folder, encrypts it with GPG (AES-256), splits it into chunks if needed, and pushes everything to your private GitHub repo. It reports the backup timestamp and size when done.

What Gets Backed Up

The skill backs up your entire ~/.openclaw folder except the following:

How Restore Works

Restoring extracts the backup on top of your existing ~/.openclaw folder. Files from the backup overwrite their matching counterparts, but any extra files already present in the new workspace are left untouched. This means workspace-specific files like new configs or channel credentials that didn't exist in the backup remain intact.

Restore Your Agent

Same conversational approach — tell your agent what you need:

• Restore the latest backup — "Restore my agent" or "Load the latest backup"
• Restore a specific version — "Restore version 20260227-120000"
• List available versions — "Show me available backups"

The agent pulls the backup from GitHub, verifies the checksum, decrypts, and extracts it into ~/.openclaw.

Update the Gateway Origin (Optional)

This step is only required if you want to access the OpenClaw Control UI from your new workspace. Skip it if you interact with your agent exclusively through connected channels like Telegram or Discord.

Add your new workspace's gateway origin to openclaw.json. Find the OPENCLAW_CONTROL_UI_ORIGIN value in your ~/.openclaw/.env file and add it to the allowedOrigins array in the gateway.controlUi section:

"gateway": {
  "mode": "local",
  "controlUi": {
    "allowedOrigins": [
      "https://openclaw-gateway--old-project--user.workspace.helloxo.nl",
      "https://openclaw-gateway--new-project--user.workspace.helloxo.nl" // ← add your new origin
    ],
    "dangerouslyDisableDeviceAuth": true
  },
  "auth": {
    "mode": "token",
    "token": "old-project" // ← your existing gateway token, change only if needed
  }
}

Replace the second URL with the value from your .env file. If the origin already exists, skip this step.

How It Works