Unfortunately, due to the number of moving parts involved, there's no one-size-fits-all solution to backing up your authoring tool install. This page is intended to highlight what's needed, as well as a few different approaches so you can choose what's best for your situation.

This is the most straightforward option of the two, but also the most time-consuming and disk-space heavy, as you're obviously backing up a lot more than simply the install.

As cloning an entire systems is a common sys-admin task, there are many options available to you depending on your operating system.

The second option is to back up your authoring tool install manually. This route is usually preferable, as it is less time-consuming as the above, and uses much less disk space. However, a greater amount of technical know-how is necessary, so it's not recommended for beginners.

The first step is to get a copy of the database. Usefully, MongoDB ships with a number of useful tools, among which are utilities for backing up and restoring: mongodump and mongorestore.

For more information, consult the official MongoDB documentation.

You'll also need to make a copy of all source files required by the application. This is essentially anything in the root of the authoring tool. Don't miss out the temp folder; despite what you may assume from its name, it's not temporary.

Tip: to save yourself some time, you may want to miss out the node_modules folder. If you do this, remember to re-run npm install after restoring the backup.