Hermes Agent Backup & Restore: Export And Import (2026)

Nous Research just made Hermes agents portable. Two commands — export and import — save your entire agent as one file and bring it back on any machine, with your persona, skills, memory and schedules intact. Here’s how it works and the detail that makes it safe to share.

What shipped: two commands

Nous Research added two commands to Hermes, and between them they change what it means to own an agent.

Command	What it does
export	Packages your whole setup into a single archive file
import	Takes that file on any other machine and brings your agent back, fully set up

That’s the whole feature. Your Hermes agent is no longer stuck on one machine — you save it as one file, move it anywhere, and it wakes up exactly how you left it. Same personality, same skills, same memory, same schedule.

And there’s one detail buried in it that most people will skim past. It’s the part that makes agent sharing safe, and I’ll come to it in a moment.

Why this matters if you actually use Hermes

A good Hermes agent takes weeks to build. Not weeks of coding — weeks of tuning.

You shape the persona file so it talks the way you want. You build skills for the tasks you repeat. The memory fills up with context about your business, your customers, your projects. You set cron jobs so it runs things on a schedule while you’re at the gym. You add plugins. You get it all just right.

Until this update, all of that lived on one machine. If your laptop broke, your agent was gone and every hour of tuning with it. If you wanted the same agent on your desktop and your travel laptop, you rebuilt it by hand. If a teammate asked how you set yours up, the honest answer was a long painful walkthrough.

That problem is now one file.

What’s inside the export file

1. The persona. The file defining who your agent is, how it talks, what it cares about and what it’s allowed to do. This is what most people spend the longest getting right, and it shapes every single response.
2. Skills. The reusable abilities it built up over time — writing emails in your exact tone, researching competitors a particular way.
3. Memory. The big one. Hermes is built around persistent memory: past sessions, your business, what you asked for last week and what worked. It’s the most valuable part of your agent because it came from your actual history together and can’t be rebuilt from scratch.
4. Cron jobs. The scheduled tasks it does on its own — morning research runs, daily summaries, checks that happen while you sleep. Import on a new machine and it picks the routine straight back up.
5. Plugins and settings. Every tool you connected, every option you changed.
6. Desktop themes and layout. Even how you arranged the desktop app moves over. A small thing, but it tells you how complete this is — Nous didn’t ship a partial backup, they shipped the whole agent.

The detail that makes it safe to share

When Hermes exports your profile, the API keys and credentials are stripped out automatically. Your login tokens, all the sensitive access — none of it goes into the file. When you import on a new machine you authenticate fresh and add your keys there.

The agent’s brain travels. Your private access doesn’t.

That single design choice is the difference between a backup feature and a sharing feature. If keys were inside the file you could never safely hand it to anyone — one leaked file and someone else is running up usage on your accounts. With credentials stripped, you can send your entire agent to another person and they plug in their own keys at their end. They get your agent’s brain, on their own access.

Four things this unlocks

1. Backup and restore

Export once, save the file somewhere safe, do it weekly. If your laptop dies or a drive fails it no longer matters — run the import command on a new machine and your agent is back within minutes with memory and skills intact.

If you’ve put weeks into tuning an agent that runs locally, this alone justifies updating. It’s also the least interesting thing on this list.

2. Moving to better hardware

You could already connect Hermes across devices, but now you can take the whole running agent and rebuild it on a different setup — or several. Export, copy the file, import, add your key, done.

Put it on a machine that runs day and night and your agent goes from part-time to around the clock, keeping everything it learned. For a small business, that’s the difference between a research agent you poke at on a laptop and one that checks your niche every morning before you wake up.

3. Teams

Say you’ve built an agent that writes product descriptions in your brand voice, or pulls together a weekly report you’ve tuned until it’s right. You can now hand that exact agent to someone on your team. Export, send, they import, they add their own keys — and in seconds they’re running the agent you spent weeks perfecting.

Before this, onboarding a teammate meant a long call walking them through every setting. Now the setup is the file. For a small agency that means the agent one person built for client research becomes the agent everyone uses the same day.

4. Shareable agent profiles

This is the one the Hermes community is most excited about. Once an agent is a single safe file, agent setups become things people pass around. Someone builds a great research agent and shares the profile. Someone tunes a content agent for newsletters and shares that. You import it, add your keys, adjust it to fit.

You’re no longer starting every agent from a blank page — you’re starting from someone else’s finished work.

People are already talking about meta-agents that manage collections of other agent profiles. That part is early, so treat it as a direction rather than a shipped feature.

The bigger shift: your agent’s identity is now yours

An agent has two parts. There’s the model — the brain underneath doing the raw thinking. And there’s everything you built on top: the persona, the skills, the memory, the routines.

The model belongs to whoever made it, whether that’s Nous Research, Anthropic, Grok or DeepSeek. It gets updated, swapped and replaced, and you don’t control that. Everything on top is yours — but until now, “yours” meant trapped on one computer. It wasn’t really an asset. It was a plant rooted in a pot you couldn’t move without breaking it.

This update pulls the agent out of the pot. Your agent’s whole identity fits in one file you hold, and the machine is just where it happens to be running today.

Which matters more over the next year than it does this week. Models keep improving — every few months there’s a better brain available. When your agent’s identity is a portable file, you keep the identity and upgrade the brain underneath it. All those weeks of tuning stop resetting every time the technology moves. Your work compounds instead of starting over.

Three objections

• “Isn’t this just a fancy backup button?” If it only backed up settings, yes. But agents aren’t settings — the memory is the record of everything it learned working with you, and the skills are abilities it built over time. When that whole living setup becomes portable you get sharing, team distribution and hardware freedom from the same file. A settings backup doesn’t do that.
• “It sounds technical.” It’s two commands, export and import. If you can save a file and open a file, you can do this. Hermes setup itself takes more effort than some tools, but that’s a one-time cost.
• “I haven’t started with agents yet, everyone’s ahead.” This shipped days ago. Someone running Hermes for six months and someone who installed it this weekend both got the ability on the same day — and the newcomer has an edge the early people never had, because you can now start from a shared profile instead of a blank setup.

Where this goes

Right now, when you want an agent, you build one. Fairly soon, when you want an agent, you’ll import one — someone will already have built a version close to what you need and you’ll start from their file and make it yours.

Every big shift in software followed this pattern. Websites went from hand-built to template-based. Documents went from blank pages to shared formats. Agents just made the same move, from hand-built and stuck in one place to packaged and portable.

Related: the memory setup worth exporting, the desktop app, and running Hermes alongside your other agents.

FAQ

How do I back up my Hermes agent?

Run the export command. Hermes packages your persona, skills, memory, cron jobs, plugins, settings and desktop layout into a single archive file you can store anywhere.

What is the Hermes backup command?

There are two: export creates the file, import restores it. Between them they handle backup, restore and moving an agent between machines.

How do I restore a Hermes agent?

Copy the exported file to the new machine and run the import command, then re-authenticate with your own API keys. Your agent comes back with memory and skills intact.

Does the export include my API keys?

No — credentials are stripped out automatically. You add your keys again on the machine you import to, which is what makes the file safe to share.

Does Hermes export my memory?

Yes, and it’s the most valuable part. Persistent memory of past sessions and your business context travels with the file.

Can I share my Hermes agent with my team?

Yes. Export once, send the file, they import and add their own keys. They get your persona, skills and approach without you walking them through every setting.

Can I run the same agent on two machines?

Yes. Export and import onto as many machines as you like — including one that runs day and night so your agent works around the clock.

Is this just a backup feature?

The backup is the least interesting part. Because credentials are stripped, the same file also enables team distribution and shareable community profiles.

The bottom line

Hermes agent backup and restore is now two commands — export packages your persona, skills, memory, cron jobs, plugins and layout into one file, and import brings it back on any machine. Credentials are stripped automatically, which quietly turns a backup tool into a sharing tool. Your agent’s identity finally belongs to you rather than to a laptop, so keep the identity and upgrade the brain underneath it.

About Julian Goldie

I run Goldie Agency, a 7-figure SEO agency, and teach this daily on a 400K+ subscriber YouTube channel. 240+ client projects on Upwork at a 100% job-success score, 10+ years through every major Google update. My systems are in the AI Profit Boardroom; my link building book is free here.