Backups, export and import

Mooring keeps its own data on your Mac: your projects, their tabs, Up Next cards (with their comments and attachments), favourites, agent setups and settings, including your own colours and terminal themes. A backup is a copy of all that in one .mooringbackup file.

A backup doesn't hold your code. That stays in your project folders and in git.

The daily backup

While Mooring is open, it saves a backup of everything once a day, in ~/Library/Application Support/Mooring/Backups/. It checks when Mooring opens and every hour after. If a backup fails, Mooring tries again an hour later. It keeps the newest 7 backups at first and deletes older ones.

Change this in Settings ▸ Backups:

• Back up daily turns the daily backup on or off. It is on at first.
• Keep last 7 backups sets how many to keep, from 1 to 60.
• Last backup says when the newest backup was made, or Never.
• Stored backups says how many backups are in the folder.
• Back Up Now makes a backup straight away.
• Reveal in Finder opens the backups folder.

The backups stay on your Mac. To keep a copy somewhere else, copy them to iCloud Drive, Dropbox or a backup disk.

Export a backup

1. Choose File ▸ Export… for everything, or File ▸ Export This Project… for just the project you're in.
2. Choose where to save the file, and click Save.

The bottom of the window shows Exporting backup…, then Backup exported. Mooring keeps working while it exports.

Merge or replace

When you import, you choose how the backup meets what's already on this Mac. The open dialog has a Replace existing data (delete first) checkbox.

• Merge, with the box unticked, is the usual choice. Mooring adds what's in the backup and keeps what's here. Where both have the same card or setting, the more recent edit wins. A merge deletes nothing, so it's safe to merge a backup more than once.
• Replace, with the box ticked, deletes the existing data of each project the backup matches, then loads the backup's. Projects the backup doesn't match are left as they are. Return doesn't start a Replace, so you can't start one by accident.

Either way, cards keep their ticket keys. SKV-42 stays SKV-42, and new cards carry on numbering after the highest one.

An import either finishes or changes nothing. It can't be undone with ⌘Z, so export a backup first if you might want to go back.

Import everything

1. Choose File ▸ Import….
2. Choose the .mooringbackup file. Tick Replace existing data (delete first) only if you want to replace.
3. Check the preview. It lists each project in the backup and the project on this Mac it goes into, marked same path, same repo or same name. A project that has nowhere to go says why it's skipped. The line at the top sums it up, for example 128 items into 14 projects · 2 skipped.
4. Click Import, or Cancel to import nothing.

The preview may also offer to clean up, with both boxes ticked at first:

• Remove … projects whose folder no longer exists on this Mac.
• Merge … duplicate agents (keeps the newest of each name). Your default agent follows the one that's kept.

Import into one project

1. Open the project you want to import into.
2. Choose File ▸ Import Into This Project….
3. Choose the .mooringbackup file, and tick Replace existing data (delete first) only if you want to replace.
4. Mooring asks, for example, Import into “Skiver”?, and shows where the backup came from, where it's going and whether it will merge or replace. Click Import.

The backup's project goes into the project you're in, even if its folder had another name or place on the Mac it came from.

Move to another Mac

1. On the old Mac, choose File ▸ Export…. Or use a daily backup.
2. Copy the file to the new Mac, by AirDrop, a shared folder or a USB stick.
3. On the new Mac, set up your projects first, so they show in Mooring's sidebar. Clone each repository, or copy its folder.
4. Choose File ▸ Import… and check the preview.

Folders are rarely in the same place on two Macs, so Mooring matches each project in the backup to one in your sidebar, in this order:

1. Same path. The same folder exists here.
2. Same repo. Both folders are clones of the same git repository, going by their origin remote.
3. Same name. Exactly one project here has the same folder name.

Mooring never guesses. If nothing matches, or two projects here could match, it skips that project and changes nothing in it. Add or tidy the project, then import the same file again. Merging twice is safe.

One setting stays behind: where Claude Code is installed, in Settings ▸ AI Agents. It is different on each Mac.

A backup made by a newer version of Mooring may not import into an older one. Update Mooring first.