# Exporting and importing data

From time to time you may want to export your application's data, e.g. for backup purposes, or to import data into a new application. For these scenarios, the wolkenkit CLI offers the export and import commands.

# Exporting data

To export data you need to run wolkenkit export and provide a directory that you want to export your application's data into. This directory must either be empty or non-existent; if it doesn't exist, it will be created automatically:

$ wolkenkit export --to <directory>

This creates a directory <directory>/event-store for the events that have been stored by your application's write model. When the export has finished, you will find one or more files named events-<number>.json in this directory (where number is a 16-digit number padded with 0s). Each file contains an array of up to 65536 events.

# Importing data

To import data you need to run wolkenkit import and provide a directory that contains the previously exported data you want to import. Please note that the event store of your application must be empty for this to work:

$ wolkenkit import --from <directory>

Once the import has finished, you need to reload your application by running the following command:

$ wolkenkit reload