Back up and migrate

Read this if you want to relocate your wiki, back OMem up, or move it to a new machine. The short version: your data is plain files in known places, and OMem can rebuild the rest from them.

What OMem stores, and where

Location	What	Back this up?
~/omem/wiki (data.wiki_path)	The curated Markdown pages — your readable memory.	Yes — this is the product.
~/.local/share/omem/raw (under data.root)	The immutable parsed-source archive (content-addressed).	Yes if you can — lets the wiki rebuild without re-parsing.
~/.config/omem/config.yaml	Your configuration.	Yes — small, and saves re-running setup.
~/.local/share/omem/.state + index	Cursors and the search index.	No — these rebuild.

The layering is deliberate (P3): delete the index and it rebuilds from the wiki; delete the wiki and it rebuilds from raw/; raw/ is never deleted. So a backup of wiki/ + raw/ + config.yaml is a complete one.

Move the vault

To relocate the wiki — onto a synced folder, into an Obsidian vault, anywhere — use omem wiki move, not a manual mv or a config edit. It relocates the files and re-points the index and any qmd collections:

omem wiki move ~/Documents/MyVault/omem --dry-run   # preview
omem wiki move ~/Documents/MyVault/omem             # do it

Don't hand-edit data.wiki_path

Editing data.wiki_path by hand leaves the old wiki stranded and unread — OMem will look in the new path and find nothing. omem wiki move is the safe path. Same for data.root: changing it by hand orphans the whole cache. See the config danger note.

Put the wiki on a synced folder

A common setup is to point the vault at a synced location so it’s backed up and available across devices:

omem wiki move ~/Library/CloudStorage/OneDrive-Personal/omem-wiki

Now your readable memory rides your existing cloud backup. (OMem’s ingest still runs locally on the Mac that has the sources.)

Move to a new machine

1. Install OMem on the new Mac (install).
2. Copy over config.yaml, the wiki/ folder, and (if you can) the raw/ archive.
3. Run omem doctor to check consistency, then omem index rebuild to rebuild the search index from the wiki.
4. Re-grant macOS permissions (omem setup --grant-tcc) — permissions are per-machine.

Your memory is portable

Because everything is open files in documented locations, you’re never locked in. Even if you stopped using OMem entirely, your wiki/ folder is a readable, grep-able, version-controllable archive of your work context — it’s yours.

What’s next

• Edit the wiki by hand — the vault is yours to read and edit.
• Configuration schema → data — the path fields.