hermes backup
Back up Hermes home directory to a zip file.
Create a zip archive of your Hermes configuration, skills, sessions, and data. The backup excludes the hermes-agent codebase itself, and it does not nest earlier backup artifacts (backups/, state-snapshots/) — each of those already contains its own copy of state.db.
The backup uses SQLite's backup() API for safe copying, so it works correctly even when Hermes is running (WAL-mode safe).
Exit status: 0 only when every selected file landed in the archive. If some files could not be added (Backup incomplete: …), the zip is kept so the rest can still be restored, but the command exits 1 — a cron or systemd timer will not report a partial archive as success, and --keep pruning is skipped so older complete archives survive. 2 means another backup was already running.
What's excluded from the zip:
From the official Hermes Agent CLI reference.
hermes backup