Back up and restore

Fabric Desktop by KratosBI keeps some things only on your PC: notebooks you haven't published, Settings, schedules on this PC, run history, proof receipts and the workloads and incidents database. If the PC is lost or replaced, those go with it. A backup is one zip you can keep somewhere safe and restore on any PC.

Your tables in OneLake, and anything you published to Fabric, aren't part of it. They stay in Fabric. A metadata project folder is also not included; keep it in Git.

Make a backup#

The commands run in the engine's Python, the one the app installed. In PowerShell, find it once:

$py = Get-ChildItem "$env:LOCALAPPDATA\FabricDesktop\engine\*\python.exe" | Sort-Object LastWriteTime | Select-Object -Last 1

Then make the backup:

& $py -m fabric_desktop.cli backup --out "$env:USERPROFILE\OneDrive\Backups"

It saves fabric-desktop-backup-<date>-<time>.zip and says which files had something left out. You can run it while the app is open.

For a headless agent, add --agent-home <its FABRIC_DESKTOP_HOME> to include its job queue and alert history.

What is never in a backup#

Restore#

1. Close Fabric Desktop by KratosBI, and stop the headless agent if you restore its files. A restore replaces database files, so it refuses, and changes nothing, while the app, the agent or anything else has one of them open.

2. Check the backup and see what it would do. This changes nothing:

   & $py -m fabric_desktop.cli restore fabric-desktop-backup-20261017-120000.zip
   

   It refuses a zip whose files changed after it was made, that isn't a backup, or that would write anywhere but the app's own folders.

3. Restore it:

   & $py -m fabric_desktop.cli restore fabric-desktop-backup-20261017-120000.zip --yes
   

4. Open the app and sign in. Set the Teams webhook again if you used one.

5. Schedules on this PC come back in Monitor > Schedules, and the app adds them to Windows Task Scheduler again as it starts.

A restore adds and replaces files, and checks each file it writes against the backup. Every file it replaces is copied first to %LOCALAPPDATA%\FabricDesktop\restore-safety\<date>-<time>, so you can put any of them back by hand. A replaced database's -wal, -shm and -journal files are moved there too, beside the database's copy: left in place, they would bring back changes made after the backup. To undo, put the database and those files back together.

These commands are covered by automated tests but haven't been run on a Windows PC yet.

On a new PC#

Install the app (Install), start it once so the engine is installed, close it, then restore as above.