Here's an uncomfortable question I want you to sit with for a second: if your laptop died tonight, how long would it take you to rebuild your Hermes agent from scratch? A proper Hermes backup is the difference between answering "about ten minutes" and answering "weeks, honestly — and some of it never." Until this week, almost everyone running Hermes was in the second camp, because there was no official way to get your agent off the machine it lived on.
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That changed on 13 August 2026, when Nous Research shipped export and import commands for Hermes agents. I made a video about it the same day, because it's quietly the most important update Hermes has had: it turns weeks of invisible work into a single file you can actually protect. This post is the insurance side of the story: what you stand to lose, the backup habit I'd start today, and where to keep the file once you've got it.
What you actually stand to lose
People underestimate this badly, and I understand why. Building a Hermes agent never feels like work while you're doing it. There's no codebase, no project folder, nothing on your desktop that looks like an asset. But add it up honestly and a good agent takes weeks to build — and not weeks of coding. Weeks of tuning.
Think about what's actually in there. The persona you shaped through dozens of small corrections until the thing finally talks the way you want it to. The skills you built one by one for the tasks you repeat every week — research runs, content workflows, reporting. The cron jobs quietly doing their thing while you're at the gym. Every piece of that took real sessions to get right.
And then there's the memory, which is the part I can't stress enough. Your agent's memory fills up from real conversations — your business, your customers, your projects, the decisions you made months ago and why. I've written a whole post on the best memory setup for a Hermes agent, and the conclusion never changes: memory is the irreplaceable bit. You cannot rebuild it, because it didn't come from a settings screen. It came from your actual history together. Lose it and it's simply gone.
Until this update, all of that lived on one machine. Laptop breaks, hard drive fails, coffee meets keyboard — agent gone, weeks of work gone, memory gone. That was the deal every Hermes user was silently accepting.
If you want an agent worth backing up, the AI Profit Boardroom walks you through the full Hermes build — persona, memory, skills, cron jobs — step by step. → Build it properly
What shipped, and why it matters
The update itself is simple. Nous Research added two things: the export command and the import command. Run the export and Hermes packages your whole agent into one archive — persona, skills, memory, cron jobs, plugins and settings, even your themes if you're running the Hermes desktop app. I've broken down everything inside the file in my Hermes export guide, so I won't repeat it here. The short version: everything that makes your agent yours, in one place.
Hermes has been shipping at a serious pace lately — my Hermes v0.20 breakdown covers the last big wave of changes — but this one goes top of my list, because it's the update that protects all the others.
The file is safe to store, even if it leaks
Here's the design decision I really rate: exporting strips your API keys and credentials automatically — they're simply not in the file. When you restore, you re-authenticate and add your keys back, and everything reconnects.
That matters more than it sounds: the file is safe in a way most backups aren't, because if it ever leaked, nobody could burn your accounts with it — there's nothing in there to log in with. One sensible caveat, though: your agent's memory contains your business context — client names, project details, things you've discussed in sessions. So treat the file with the same basic privacy care you'd give any business document. Common sense, not paranoia.
The Hermes backup habit
Right, the actual system — almost embarrassingly simple, which is why it works: export once, save the file somewhere safe, then do it again weekly. That's it. That's the whole habit. Once it's in place, hardware failure stops being a catastrophe and becomes a minutes-long inconvenience. Your laptop dying goes from "I've lost weeks of work" to "annoying — I'll restore on the new machine this afternoon."
If you're thinking "I'm not technical enough for this" — it's one command and saving a file. If you can attach a document to an email, you can do a Hermes backup. I've covered the exact steps in my Hermes backup command guide if you want them.
Weekly is the baseline. On top of that, there are moments when I'd export immediately, regardless of when the last one was:
- Before big changes to your persona or skills — so if the experiment goes sideways, you can get back to the version that worked.
- Before moving machines or an OS upgrade — the exact moments things traditionally go wrong.
- After a burst of tuning you'd hate to redo — if you've just spent an evening getting something right, bank it.
Where should the file live? Somewhere that isn't the machine your agent runs on — that's the only rule that genuinely matters. A backup sitting on the same drive that fails is not a backup, it's a decoration. An external drive works. Your own cloud storage works. Ideally both. And because the keys are stripped, you don't need an elaborate security setup — normal care is enough.
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Restoring, in brief
The other half, quickly: on the new machine you run the import command, add your keys back, and your agent wakes up exactly as you left it — same persona, same skills, memory intact, and your scheduled jobs resume on their own. The first time I did this it was honestly a bit surreal; it just carried on as if nothing had happened. I've written the full recovery walkthrough separately in my step-by-step restore guide, so if you're mid-disaster right now, go straight there.
The same file doubles as your sharing mechanism
Worth one paragraph: the export file isn't only insurance. It's also how you hand your agent to someone else. Give the archive to a teammate, they import it on their machine, add their own keys, and they're running your exact setup — same persona, same skills. It's how I've moved my Agent OS configuration between machines, and it's how you standardise one agent across a whole team. That's a topic for another day, though — this page's job is making sure you never lose yours.
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Your agent is an asset now — treat it like one
The mindset shift underneath all of this: your agent's identity — persona, skills, memory — is now a file you own. The model underneath will keep swapping and upgrading; every time I put new releases through Goldie Bench, my own testing, the rankings shuffle again. But your agent's identity persists through all of it, so your investment compounds instead of resetting. If someone tells you "this is just a settings backup", they've missed the point — settings are preferences, whereas an agent is accumulated working history. A living record of everything you've built together. I go deeper on the whole lifecycle in my Hermes agent backup and restore hub, but the one-line version is this: treat the file like the business asset it is.
With and without a Hermes backup
If you want the whole argument in one table, here it is.
| Scenario | Without a backup | With a weekly backup |
|---|---|---|
| Dead laptop | Agent gone — persona, skills and memory lost. Weeks to partially rebuild. | Import on a new machine, add your keys, back within minutes. |
| New machine | Start from scratch and retune everything by hand. | Import, re-authenticate, carry on exactly where you left off. |
| Teammate wants your setup | Long screen-share sessions trying to recreate it manually. | Send them the file; they import it with their own keys. |
| Bad tuning session | No way back — live with it or unpick it by trial and error. | Restore last week's export and you're back to the version that worked. |
Hermes backup FAQ
How often should I back up Hermes?
Weekly as a baseline, plus an extra export before anything risky: major persona or skill changes, machine moves, OS upgrades, or after a tuning session you're particularly happy with. The weekly one is the habit; the extras are insurance on top of the insurance.
Where should I keep the file?
Off the machine your agent runs on. An external drive or your own cloud storage both work, and two copies beat one. Because credentials are stripped, it needs no special handling beyond the normal privacy care you'd give any file that contains business context.
Are my API keys in the backup?
No. Keys and credentials are stripped automatically when you export, which is exactly why the file is safe to store. You re-authenticate when you restore and everything reconnects. Even if the file leaked, nobody could get into your accounts with it.
Can I restore to a different machine?
Yes — that's the whole point of portability. Export on the old machine, import on the new one, add your keys, and your agent wakes up exactly as it was, cron schedules included. It works whether the old machine is alive or in a skip.
What if I never backed up and my machine died?
Then I have to be straight with you: whatever lived only on that machine is gone. The persona and skills can be rebuilt with time; the memory can't, because it came from real sessions that existed nowhere else. It's a rubbish answer, and it's the reason this post exists. Start the habit today with the agent you have now.
My verdict
The whole point of insurance is that you sort it before the bad day, not after — "I'll do it later" is exactly what people say right up until the laptop dies. This costs you one command and a saved file, once a week. Set against weeks of tuning, a memory you cannot rebuild and cron jobs working while you sleep, it's the best-value five minutes in your calendar. Do your first Hermes backup today, put a weekly reminder in, and hardware failure becomes a footnote instead of a disaster.
If you want an agent that survives dead laptops, new machines and everything in between, check out the AI Profit Boardroom — inside you get step-by-step Hermes tutorials (including export and moving machines), the Agent OS, four weekly coaching calls, daily updates and 3,000+ business owners building alongside you. → Protect the weeks you've put in
