Import & Export

The portable Nostos export

Nostos is designed so your library can move between hosted and self-hosted installations.

A portable Nostos export contains supported library data and media needed to recreate that library in another Nostos installation. It is the supported transfer path between deployments.

What is included

Portable exports preserve supported:

• books, bibliographic information, and source media;
• reading progress, ratings, favorites, reviews, and timestamps;
• collections and collection membership;
• notes, concepts, and links between them;
• Writing Studio documents and folder hierarchy;
• supported reading and assistant preferences.

Account information, billing data, credentials, and hosting-specific settings are not part of a portable library export.

Export does not change your library

Creating a portable export does not delete or move the source library.

Keep the export until you have verified the destination library.

Import rules

The current portable import supports an empty library only. It does not merge two existing libraries.

Nostos validates the export before applying it. If the export cannot be imported safely, it is rejected rather than partially merged into the destination.

For the hosted first-run flow, see Importing an Existing Library.

Hosted → SelfHosted

The same portability path works in the other direction: export your hosted library, start a SelfHosted Nostos installation, and import the export into an empty library.

Portable export is also the customer-controlled copy available through the recoverable account-deletion flow.

Portability is not the same as backup

A portable export is your own transferable copy of the library.

Hosted backups are managed by Nostos to recover the hosted service. SelfHosted installations use their own local backup system.

See Backups & Recovery for the distinction.