Backup Manager — Documentation
Welcome to the Backup Manager documentation. New here? Follow the Getting started tutorial — it takes you from nothing to a verified, restorable backup in about ten minutes. After that, the pages below are your reference.
Contents
- Getting started — a from-scratch tutorial
- Installation
- Configuration
- Databases
- Files
- Storage destinations
- Security & the manifest
- Restore
- Retention
- Incremental & deduplicated backups
- Scheduling & monitoring
- CLI reference
- Extending the package
- Pro & the UI dashboard
Open-core. This package is the free MIT core. Incremental backups, GFS retention, HMAC signing, monitoring and the web dashboard are commercial add-ons — see Pro & the UI dashboard. Pro-only sections in these docs are marked with a Pro callout.
Concepts in one minute
- A profile is a named backup definition (what to back up, where to store it).
You can have many; the
defaultprofile is used when none is given. - A backup is a single compressed, optionally encrypted TAR archive plus a JSON manifest sidecar.
- A destination is a Laravel filesystem disk. A profile can write to several at once.
- Retention decides which historical backups to keep; restore brings a backup back, always after verifying its integrity against the manifest.
Design philosophy
The package favours composition over inheritance. Every capability lives
behind a small interface (DatabaseDumper, Compressor, Encryptor, Signer,
Archiver, BackupRepository, RetentionStrategy, BackupStage) with a focused
implementation, wired together with dependency injection. This makes each part
independently testable and easy to replace — and makes building a UI layer on top
straightforward, which is an explicit goal of this package.