My Hermes agent stopped being trapped inside one machine this week. On 13 August 2026, Nous Research shipped Hermes agent backup and restore — two commands, export and import — and with that, everything I have spent months building into my agent became a single file I can copy, move, share and store anywhere I like.
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I run Hermes every day across my SEO and content business, so I have been hammering this update since the moment it landed. I have written five deeper guides on the individual pieces, and I will point you to each one as we go. This page is the full picture: what shipped, the complete lifecycle from build to restore, the four things it unlocks, and the bigger idea underneath that I think most people are still missing.
What Nous Research actually shipped
Two commands. That is the entire surface area. The export command packs your whole agent into one archive: the persona (identity, voice, permissions — the file I have tuned more than anything else I own), your skills (the reusable abilities you have taught it), your memory (the persistent record of every session and everything it knows about your business), your cron jobs (the schedules that keep it working while you sleep), plugins and settings, and even your desktop themes and layout. The import command does the reverse: run it on any machine and the agent wakes up exactly as you left it.
The design decision that makes this bigger than a save button: keys and credentials are stripped from the archive automatically, and you re-authenticate wherever you import. That one choice turns a backup feature into a safe sharing feature, because a leaked file cannot burn anyone's accounts. If you have followed my coverage since Hermes v0.20, you know Nous Research ships quickly — but this release is different in kind, not just in degree.
The problem this kills
A genuinely good agent takes weeks of tuning. You shape the persona sentence by sentence, build skills for your actual workflows, and the memory — the thing that makes the agent feel like it knows you — only exists because of the hours you have spent working together. It cannot be rebuilt, because it came from your real history.
Until this week, all of that lived on one machine. Laptop dies: agent gone. Teammate wants your setup: a long walkthrough, and their copy still is not your copy. Second machine: manual rebuild, from memory, badly. That is the exact gap Hermes agent backup and restore closes.
If you want an agent worth exporting in the first place, the AI Profit Boardroom walks the full build — persona, memory, skills, cron jobs — with daily tutorials and live help. → Build the asset
The full Hermes agent backup and restore lifecycle
Here is the whole loop, end to end. I keep it survey-depth here and link the deeper guides where they earn their place.
- Build. Daily use creates the value: persona tuned, skills added, memory accumulating. If you are early on, get the memory side right first — I wrote up the best memory setup for a Hermes agent — because memory is the one component you can never recreate later. Mine runs inside my Agent OS setup, sitting alongside Claude and OpenClaw.
- Export. Run the export command and Hermes produces one archive containing the lot. I have a full breakdown of what is inside a Hermes export file if you want the anatomy.
- Store. Treat the archive like any file your business depends on: keep it off the machine that made it, and keep more than one version.
- Move or share. This is where it stops being a backup and starts being portability. The archive is just a file — copy it to a new machine, hand it to a teammate, or pass it around a community.
- Import. Run the import command on the destination and the agent wakes exactly as you left it. Both commands and their behaviour are in my Hermes backup command reference.
- Re-key. Sign back in to your services. Nothing sensitive travelled in the file, so your credentials are added fresh, by you.
- Carry on. Cron schedules resume on their own. The agent picks up mid-stride, as if nothing happened.
The four unlocks
1. Protection: hardware failure becomes a minor event
Export weekly, store the file somewhere safe, and a dead laptop goes from months of lost work to minutes of restore. This is the lowest-effort, highest-value habit in the whole piece, and the place everyone should start. My weekly routine, where the files live and how many versions I keep are all in my guide to the Hermes backup habit.
2. Hardware freedom: your agent stops being tied to one box
Because the agent moves in one file, the machine becomes a choice rather than a constraint. Move to a faster machine when you outgrow the old one, or to a device that never sleeps, or to a VPS — and a part-time laptop agent becomes an around-the-clock one. My Hermes restore walkthrough covers a full move, step by step.
3. Teams: one person tunes it, everyone runs it
Export once, and every teammate imports the same file with their own keys. The agent one person spent weeks perfecting becomes the whole team's agent the same day — same persona, same skills, same memory — with no onboarding walkthroughs that half-work. The team side, including shared profiles, is in my guide to Hermes import for teams.
4. Shareable community profiles
The one I find most interesting long-term: agents passed around like templates. Instead of starting from a blank persona, you start from someone's finished work and adapt it. There is already early community talk about meta-agents managing whole collections of profiles — to be clear, that is a plan people are discussing, not a shipped feature. But the direction of travel is obvious.
📺 Watch: Grok Bot DESTROYS Hermes Agent?
The big idea: you own the identity, not the brain
If you only remember one thing from this page, make it this. An agent has two parts. The model is the brain underneath — Nous, Anthropic, Grok, DeepSeek, whichever you run. It belongs to whoever made it, gets updated, swapped and replaced on their schedule, and you do not control it. Then there is everything you built on top: the persona, the skills, the memory, the routines. That part is yours.
Until now, "yours" came with an asterisk, because it was trapped on one computer — a plant rooted in one pot that you could not move without breaking it. This update pulls the agent out of the pot. The identity now lives in one file you hold. Copy it, move it, share it, store it. The machine is just where the agent happens to run today.
That matters because models keep improving every few months. With a portable identity you keep the identity and upgrade the brain. Which brain wins is a question I settle with my own Goldie Bench side-by-sides — when a new model drops, I test it against what I am running, and if it wins, the identity moves over. Weeks of tuning stop resetting every time the technology moves, and your work finally compounds.
The people who understand this will invest properly in persona, skills and memory, because the investment is now permanent. The people who do not will keep treating agents like throwaway chat sessions and wonder why their results never build on themselves. We have seen the pattern before: websites went from hand-built to templates, documents went from blank pages to shared formats. Agents are making the same move. Soon, when you want an agent, you will not build one — you will import one.
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The objections, answered
- "It is just a fancy backup button." Settings can be rebuilt; an agent's memory cannot, because it is a living record of your actual history together. And no backup button I have used also handles sharing, team distribution and hardware moves from the same file.
- "Too technical for me." It is two commands — functionally, saving a file and opening it. Setting Hermes up in the first place takes more effort than this, and that is a one-time job that gets far easier with someone showing you the screen.
- "Too late to start." The feature is days old and everyone got it on the same day. Shared profiles mean newcomers can start from finished work instead of a blank slate — the starting line just moved closer to you, not further away.
The lifecycle at a glance
| Stage | Command involved | What to know |
|---|---|---|
| Build | None — daily use | Persona, skills and memory grow with real work; memory is the irreplaceable piece |
| Export | The export command | One archive holds the whole agent; keys are stripped automatically |
| Store | None | Keep it off the machine that made it, and keep more than one version |
| Move or share | None | It is just a file — a new machine, a teammate or a community can take it |
| Import | The import command | Any machine; the agent wakes exactly as you left it |
| Re-key | None — sign in inside Hermes | Credentials never travel in the file, so you add your own |
| Carry on | None | Cron schedules resume on their own |
FAQ
What does a Hermes backup include?
Everything that makes the agent yours: persona (identity, voice, permissions), skills, memory, cron jobs, plugins and settings, and desktop themes and layout. The one thing it deliberately excludes is keys and credentials.
Is it safe to share an exported agent?
By design, yes. Credentials are stripped automatically at export, so a shared — or even leaked — file cannot touch your accounts. Whoever imports it signs in with their own keys.
How do I restore my agent on a new machine?
Run the import command with your archive, sign back in to your services, and carry on. The agent wakes exactly as you left it and your schedules resume without being rebuilt.
Can my teammates use my agent?
Yes — that is one of the four unlocks. You export once, they import the file and add their own credentials, and the agent you tuned becomes theirs the same day.
Will my agent survive model upgrades?
That is the whole point of portable identity. The model is the replaceable brain; the exported file is the permanent, you-shaped part. When a better model arrives, you keep the file and swap the brain underneath it.
Verdict: build an agent worth keeping
My verdict is simple: this is the update that makes serious agent-building rational. Hermes agent backup and restore means the weeks you put into persona, skills and memory are no longer hostage to a single machine or a single model generation. Export weekly, store it properly, move it when better hardware makes sense, share it when your team is ready. The agent is no longer the thing on your laptop — it is the file you hold, and everything you add to it from today carries forward.
If you want an agent that compounds instead of resetting, check out the AI Profit Boardroom — inside you get step-by-step Hermes tutorials including export and import, the Agent OS with Hermes running next to Claude and OpenClaw with shared memory, four weekly coaching calls, a prompt library, a member map and 3,000+ business owners building the same way. → Build an agent worth keeping
