How to back up SillyTavern chats and move to a new PC

What is in the data folder

Inside your SillyTavern folder, data/default-user holds one person's whole collection. In recent versions the parts you care about are:

• characters: one PNG card per character.
• chats: a folder per character, with one .jsonl file per chat.
• groups and group chats: group definitions and their conversations.
• worlds: lorebooks as JSON.
• User Avatars: persona pictures. Persona descriptions are kept in settings.json.
• OpenAI Settings and the other settings folders: your presets.
• settings.json: almost every choice you have made in the interface.
• secrets.json: your API keys.

If accounts are turned on, each user has their own folder next to default-user. Installs older than version 1.12 kept chats and cards under public instead; if there is no data folder, look there.

Making a backup

Stop SillyTavern first, so no chat is half written when you copy it. Then copy or zip the data folder and config.yaml. From a terminal in the SillyTavern folder, this makes one dated archive on Windows 10 and later, macOS or Linux:

• tar -czf st-backup-2026-10-29.tar.gz data config.yaml

Keep the archive off the computer: a USB drive, another machine or cloud storage. One copy on the same disk does not survive the disk.

Treat the archive as private. secrets.json holds your keys in plain text, and your chats are your chats. Before sharing a folder with anyone, for example to ask for help, take secrets.json out. If you ever post it by mistake, delete those keys at each provider and make new ones.

Recent versions also keep rolling automatic copies of chats in a backups folder inside the user's data. That is an undo button for a bad edit, not a backup: it lives on the same disk.

Saving one chat or one character

For a single story you do not need the whole folder. Manage chat files, in the menu at the bottom left of the chat, lists the current character's chats and lets you export one as .jsonl, which SillyTavern can import again, or as plain text for reading. A character exports as PNG or JSON from its own panel. Those are the files to send to a friend or keep with a story you are proud of.

Moving to a new computer

• On the new machine, install SillyTavern the same way as before and start it once, so it creates its folders.
• Stop it.
• Copy your old data folder over the new one, replacing files when asked, and copy config.yaml if you changed it.
• Start SillyTavern and check one chat and one lorebook.

Use the same version or a newer one on the new machine. SillyTavern is built to upgrade older data when it starts, not to read data from a version newer than itself.

Phone to PC and back

On Termux, run termux-setup-storage once so Termux can reach your Downloads folder, then:

• tar -czf ~/storage/downloads/st-data.tar.gz -C ~/SillyTavern data

Move that file to the computer and unpack it into the SillyTavern folder there. The other way round, put the archive in Downloads and unpack it with tar -xzf ~/storage/downloads/st-data.tar.gz -C ~/SillyTavern while SillyTavern is stopped.

If you chat through a UnsavedAI key, this matters more than usual: API traffic is never stored on our side, so the copy in this folder is the only copy of those stories. Characters you made on the UnsavedAI site are different: they live in your browser, so download each one as a Character Card V2 file from the chat's ⋯ menu and keep it with your SillyTavern backups.

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