OpenClaw Tips and Tricks

I've been running OpenClaw agents every day for over 200 days now (the story so far). This post collects the practical things I wish someone had written down when I started. Only stuff I actually run. One tip at a time, as they earn their place.

---

Back up the whole setup from outside OpenClaw

My first instinct was to schedule backups as an OpenClaw automation. Wrong tool. The reason you need a backup is that the thing you're backing up might be the thing that's down, so the backup can't live inside it. Mine runs from the system crontab, in a plain shell script. Same logic as keeping agent memory in files on disk: the important stuff stays outside the blast radius.

Every night the cron fires a script that does four things:

1. Stages the SQLite databases with sqlite3 .backup, which produces a consistent copy while the live files are mid-write. Tar a database that's being written and you will eventually archive a half-written page.
2. Tars all of ~/.openclaw, staged copies included.
3. Keeps 7 daily copies. Sunday's run gets flagged as the weekly archive set and kept for 30 days.
4. Writes a line to backup.log every run. When something goes wrong, the log is the postmortem.

Then the step everyone skips: I did a restore from the tarball before trusting any of it. Backups you haven't tested are hopes, not backups.

I wrote about the night a session reset took the gateway down and the files on disk saved it (When bits hit the fan). This covers the failure one level up: the machine itself. Total cost is a shell script, one crontab line, and about a minute a night. Cheap insurance for months of memory files, session history, and configuration.