My laptop died on a Tuesday morning — black screen, drive gone, no warning, right in the middle of a client sprint. By lunchtime the same day, a Hermes backup restore had my agent running on a different machine as though nothing had happened: same personality, same skills, same memory of every project we had ever worked on. A year ago, that dead laptop would have cost me weeks of rebuilding. This time it cost me a sandwich break. In this guide I will walk you through the recovery, from broken machine to running agent, plus the three other restore situations you will be glad you understood.
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Quick context first. On 13 August 2026, Nous Research shipped an update to Hermes that added an export command and an import command. Export packs your entire agent into a single file. Import unpacks it on any machine that runs Hermes. That second half — the restore — is what this page covers.
What a Hermes backup restore actually brings back
When most people hear "backup" they picture documents. This is a different animal. The export file carries the whole agent, so a restore brings back:
- Persona — the personality and tone you have shaped over months of use
- Skills — every capability you have added or built
- Memory — the record of everything it has learned working with you
- Cron jobs — your scheduled routines, ready to resume
- Plugins, settings and themes — the full setup, down to how it looks
The one thing that does not come back automatically is credentials. API keys are stripped from the file, and later on I will explain why that is a feature rather than a flaw. If you want the full anatomy of the file itself, I have broken that down in my Hermes export guide — this page is about the journey in the opposite direction.
The Hermes backup restore walkthrough
Here is the entire recovery, start to finish. I am deliberately not printing exact syntax, because commands can change between versions — the precise commands live in the official docs, the video, and my Hermes backup command reference. The shape of the process is what you need to remember:
- Install Hermes on the target machine. New laptop, old desktop, a mini PC, a VPS — anywhere Hermes runs.
- Run the import command with your file. Point it at the export you saved and let it unpack.
- The agent wakes exactly as you left it. Same persona, same skills, same memory, same schedules — it carries on where you left off rather than starting from a blank slate.
- Authenticate fresh. Add your API keys and reconnect your services on the new machine. This is the only manual step in the whole process.
- Cron jobs pick their routine back up. The schedules travelled inside the file, so your automations resume without being rebuilt.
That is it. Minutes, not weeks. If you can open a file and run a command, you can do this — the "I'm not technical enough" objection does not survive contact with step two.
If you want your agent running 24/7 after the restore, the AI Profit Boardroom covers moving Hermes to always-on setups step by step. → See the always-on setup
The four restores you will actually run
A restore is not one scenario, it is four. The steps are identical every time; the situations feel nothing alike.
1. The disaster restore: dead laptop to running agent
This is the one that sells the whole feature. Before this update, a failed drive meant your agent was simply gone. The persona you could eventually rebuild by hand, if you remembered every tweak. The skills you could reinstall one by one. But the memory — hundreds of sessions of context about your business, your clients, your way of working — could never be rebuilt from scratch, because you do not consciously know most of what is in there. Now the disaster script reads differently: get any machine, install Hermes, import your latest file, add your keys, and everything is back — including the one part no amount of effort could recreate. My Tuesday laptop death was exactly this, and the agent was answering questions about a live client project before lunch.
2. The upgrade restore: from laptop toy to 24/7 asset
My favourite of the four, because nothing broke — you are restoring by choice. Import your agent onto better hardware, or onto a machine that never sleeps, and it stops being something you poke at whenever the laptop happens to be open and becomes something that works around the clock. Restore onto a 24/7 device or a VPS and your research agent checks your niche every morning before you wake, because the cron jobs came across with everything else. This pairs beautifully with a Hermes local model setup on the beefier machine, and with a Tailscale AI gateway so you can reach the always-on box securely from wherever you happen to be.
3. The multi-machine restore: desktop at home, laptop on the road
Restore the same file onto your desktop and your travel laptop and you have the same agent identity in both places. One honest caveat, because I refuse to oversell this: they run as separate copies. The desktop copy does not know what the laptop copy did this afternoon — there is no live sync between them. My advice is to pick where the "main" agent lives, treat the other as a satellite, and re-export and import whenever you want to bring the two snapshots level. Imperfect, yes, but having your agent with you on a trip beats leaving it at home.
4. The rollback restore: undoing a bad week
Recently I got aggressive with persona changes and a couple of experimental skills, and I made my agent genuinely worse — hesitant, waffly, second-guessing itself. The old answer was to remember every change and unpick them by hand. The new answer: import last week's file, and you are back on the good version in minutes. Once you have felt that safety net catch you once, you experiment far more boldly, which is the quiet superpower of the whole system.
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Verify the restore: my post-import checklist
After every restore I run the same checks before trusting the agent with real work:
- Ask it something only its memory would know — a client detail, an old decision, an inside reference. If it answers, the memory travelled.
- Fire a skill — trigger one capability you built and confirm it behaves the way it did before.
- Check the cron schedule shows — your routines should be listed and ready to run.
- Confirm plugins, settings and theme — the setup should look and behave like home.
- Re-key services one by one — add each credential, test the connection, then move to the next.
One extra habit of mine: after a restore I re-check which brain the identity is actually running on, because the file restores who your agent is, while the model underneath is whatever the new machine provides. That is a Goldie Bench job — my quick personal test to see how the agent performs on the new setup before I hand it anything important.
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Why your API keys do not travel
The credential stripping annoys people until they think it through. The export file is built to move around — you will copy it to drives and cloud storage, and one day you might share a version. So the brain travels, and private access does not. Re-authenticating fresh on the new machine is the one manual step in a Hermes backup restore, and it is also the exact reason a leaked file cannot burn your accounts: whoever holds the file holds no keys, no logins, no ability to act as you on your connected services. I will take five minutes of pasting keys over that risk every single time.
The plant is out of the pot
Here is the bigger point, and I will keep it brief because I go deep on it in my Hermes agent backup and restore hub. Restore is the feature that turns an agent from a thing trapped on one computer into a genuine business asset. Hardware stops being where your agent lives and becomes merely the place the agent happens to run today. The plant is out of the pot. The same mechanics also power sharing — importing an agent somebody else exported — which I cover in my Hermes backup import guide, and this portability thinking now sits at the heart of how I run my whole Agent OS.
| Scenario | The old world | With restore |
|---|---|---|
| Dead laptop or failed drive | Weeks of tuning gone; the memory unrecoverable | Install, import, re-key — back within minutes |
| Upgrade to a 24/7 device or VPS | Rebuild the agent by hand on the new machine | Import once; schedules resume around the clock |
| Desktop at home plus travel laptop | Two separately trained agents drifting apart | Same identity on both, synced by snapshot |
| Persona experiment gone wrong | Remember every change and undo it manually | Import last week's file; back on the good version |
Hermes backup restore FAQ
How long does a restore take?
Minutes, once Hermes is installed on the target machine. The import itself is quick; re-adding your API keys is usually the longest part, and even that is a cup-of-tea job rather than an afternoon.
Do I need the same operating system or the same machine?
No. Any machine that runs Hermes can receive your file — that is the entire point of the portability update. Old laptop to new laptop, laptop to VPS, whichever direction you need.
Will my scheduled tasks restart on their own?
Yes. Cron jobs are part of the export, so once the agent wakes on the new machine, your routines pick back up on their existing schedule without being rebuilt.
Do I have to re-enter my API keys?
Yes, and it is deliberate. Keys are stripped from every export for safety, so authenticating fresh on the new machine is a designed step, not an oversight.
Can I restore an old version over a bad change?
Yes — that is the rollback restore. Import an earlier file and the agent returns to exactly the state it was in when you took that export, bad experiment erased.
My verdict on restoring your Hermes backup
The restore is the half of this update that changes how you sleep. Export is admin; restore is the moment the admin pays off — a dead laptop becomes an errand, an upgrade becomes an afternoon, a bad experiment becomes reversible. And if you are reading this thinking you will sort it out later, one warning from a man whose laptop actually died on a Tuesday: the restore you will wish you could do starts with the export you take today. Build the Hermes backup habit now, while nothing is broken, and future you gets the boring ten-minute version of a disaster instead of the expensive one.
If you want an agent that survives any dead laptop and runs around the clock, check out the AI Profit Boardroom — inside you get the Hermes setup and restore tutorials, the Agent OS, four weekly coaching calls, the member map and 3,000+ business owners building the same systems. → Get the restore tutorials
