Vault backups

Every night, PulsVault backs up your organization's vaults and keeps each backup for as long as your plan allows. On Team, Business and Enterprise plans, backups are managed by the organization: they live under Organization → Vault backups, and only administrators can take, restore or configure them.

Members do not have a Backups screen of their own on these plans. Their vaults are still backed up every night, but restoring is an administrative act, and Settings is open to every member.

What an administrator sees#

Each organization vault that has backups — including ones that were deleted — with its owner, its custodians, and how many restore points it has.

Members' personal vaults are never shown here. A member's primary vault and personal vaults are theirs: the organization cannot see them in its backups, cannot count them, and cannot restore them.

Who	Can
Members with Manage Business Config	Take a backup now, set how long backups are kept, and restore
Members with Read Business Reports	See which vaults have backups and their restore points
Everyone else	Nothing here — ask an administrator

Taking a backup now#

About to make a big change — a bulk edit, an import, a clean-up? Choose Back up now first. It backs up every organization vault straight away, on top of the nightly backup, and runs in the background: the new restore points appear in the list as each vault owner's backup finishes, usually within a few minutes.

You can start one once an hour. The page shows when the last one started and when the next one can; if you try sooner, it tells you how long to wait. Nightly backups keep running as usual.

If your plan lapses and the organization becomes read-only, Back up now and restoring are paused until it is active again; nightly backups keep running. On Enterprise, the backup archive can still deliver a copy to your own storage.

How long backups are kept#

Plan	Backups kept
Team	30 days
Business	90 days
Enterprise	180 days

Under How long backups are kept, an administrator can shorten the window for the whole organization to anything from one day up to the plan's limit. It cannot be lengthened past the plan: a backup is a copy of every vault, and a longer window would be storage nobody quoted you for. Shortening it takes effect on the next nightly run, which deletes anything already past the new window. If your plan changes, your choice is kept: a downgrade narrows what is in force without overwriting it, and an upgrade brings it back.

Restoring an organization vault#

1. Select one or more vaults — or all of them with the box at the top of the list; one restore takes up to 20 — and choose Restore.
2. Pick the backup to restore each vault from. The newest is selected for you.
3. Review what will happen: the new vault's name, who will own it, who will hold its key, and anyone who will not get access back.
4. If a vault's owner has left, choose which of its custodians takes ownership.
5. Confirm. Each vault is created as a new organization vault next to the existing one, named for the night it is from — for example Payroll (restored from 20 Sep 2026) — and nothing is overwritten.

The owner and every custodian of a restored vault are notified, told who restored it and which night the copy is from. The restore is recorded permanently in the audit log.

Restoring creates a new vault rather than overwriting the old one on purpose. A vault's key can change after a backup is taken — it does when someone's access is removed — and writing old data back over a live vault could make those items permanently unreadable, with nothing on our side able to detect it, because we cannot read either version.

If the owner has left#

The restored vault is offered to the custodian the administrator chose. Until they accept, every custodian can already open it. To accept, that custodian opens Vaults — a notice at the top says the vault is waiting — and chooses Accept ownership with their vault unlocked. Accepting seals the vault's key with their own, which only their device can do.

A restore point can only be restored if at least one person who held the vault's key in that backup still works here. If nobody did, choose a later restore point.

On Enterprise: the backup archive#

Vault Backups restore inside PulsVault. An Enterprise organization can also keep its own backup archive: its whole configuration, DevOps secrets, organization vaults and audit log, encrypted to keys only it holds and delivered to its own storage — a copy it can open without PulsVault.