What happens to your data

Each workspace gets a daily backup of its BookStack database and files, including pages, attachments and images. Backups are encrypted with age and authenticated with an HMAC signature. We keep seven days of backups locally. A first backup is triggered directly after a workspace is provisioned.

Since 10 September 2026, the nightly backup runs while the service stays running. We check database and file consistency around the backup. If consistency cannot be confirmed after three attempts, the process automatically falls back to the previous method, which briefly stops the service. The earlier nightly method caused around ten seconds of interruption per workspace each day.

We restore encrypted backups into isolated test instances on a private network. The HMAC is checked before decryption. We compare the restored data and files with the original and check the restored instance over HTTP.

9 September 2026 — demo restore: The restored database matched the original counts for 11 pages, three books and 17 page revisions. Roles, permissions, settings, and the hash of page titles and update times matched. This demo had no uploaded attachments or images. HTTP retrieval was not verified in this first test.

9 September 2026 — attachment and image restore: A separate temporary workspace supplied real test uploads. The restored attachment and image files matched byte-for-byte using SHA-256 comparisons; the upload manifest matched all 21 files, including generated image variants. Attachment and image database rows also matched. The restored login page, content page and image each returned HTTP 200; the page title and content, and the image content type, were checked.

The live demo’s before-and-after fingerprints were identical in both tests. The isolated test resources were removed afterwards.

Monitoring runs every ten minutes. When a backup has stopped the service, we restart the workspace and check that it is running and ready to serve requests before reporting the backup as successful. A failed recovery is reported as an error.

For support or help restoring a backup, email info@productivity-boost.com.