Backing up your data is a critical part of CMS. Data backup is the process of creating duplicate copies of data to protect against data loss due to hardware failures, human error, ransomware, or natural disasters.

It ensures our business runs smoothly and provides peace of mind by enabling rapid information restoration, reducing downtime, and maintaining productivity.

How to back up your Ghost CMS?

To back up Ghost CMS, you can use two methods:

1. Ghost CMS dashboard

2. Ghost CLI

Ghost CMS dashboard

To back up Ghost CMS using the dashboard, follow a simple manual process, even if you're a beginner.

1. Content, settings, and analytics backup

2. Redirects and routes backup

3. Themes backup

4. Members backup

Content, settings, and analytics backup

Open the Ghost CMS dashboard, go to Settings, click on the Import/Export tab, and then click on the Export button.

Click on the Content & Settings and Post Analytics buttons to back up your blog content, settings, and post analytics data, but note that it does not include images.

After exporting content and settings data, it looks like this.

{
  "db": [
    {
      "meta": {
        "exported_on": 1777721984892,
        "version": "6.32.0"
      },
      "data": {
        "newsletters": [...],
        "posts": [...],
        "posts_meta": [...],
        "posts_authors": [...],
        "roles": [...],
        "roles_users": [...],
        "settings": [...],
        "tags": [...],
        "posts_tags": [...],
        "products": [...],
        "offers": [...],
        "benefits": [...],
        "products_benefits": [...],
        "posts_products": [...],
        "offer_redemptions": [...],
        "stripe_products": [...],
        "stripe_prices": [...],
        "snippets": [...],
        "custom_theme_settings": [...],
        "users": [...]
      }
    }
  ]
}

Redirects and routes backup

Next, we need to back up the current Redirects and Routes file in Ghost CMS. To do this, follow these steps: go to Settings, scroll down to the Labs section, and click the Open button.

Click the Open button to access your redirects and routes options. Then, select "Download current redirects" and "Download current routes" to obtain the backup files.

Themes backup

To back up themes, you can download the themes installed in your Ghost CMS, including your current active theme.

To create a backup, go to Settings, click on the Themes tab, and then click on the Change Theme button.

Next, click on the Installed button.

Select the Ghost CMS theme you want to back up, click on the three dots button, and then select the download button to download the theme for backup.

Members backup

Finally, export all members into a single CSV file from the Members dashboard in Ghost CMS. Go to Dashboard > click on the Members tab > then click on the three dots to display all available options.

Next, select the Export all members option to export all the members from ghost cms.

The main drawback of the Ghost CMS dashboard is that:

1. You cannot download images, files, or media (video and audio) from the Ghost CMS dashboard.

2. Backing up data using the Ghost CMS dashboard is also time-consuming and must be done manually each time.

Ghost CLI

Ghost CLI is a tool to help you manage your Ghost CMS locally on your machine or laptop. It allows for installation, setup (configuration), uninstallation, starting, stopping, backup, updating your Ghost CMS instance, etc., using ghost cli on your machine.

In the upcoming article, I will teach you how to use Ghost CLI and manage ghost cms in detail.

But in this article, we can use the Ghost CLI backup command or option to take a backup of ghost cms data.

ghost backup

First, install the Ghost CLI on your machine using the following command.

# NPM
npm install ghost-cli@latest -g

# Yarn
yarn global add ghost-cli@latest

# PNPM
pnpm add -g ghost-cli@latest

# Bun
bun add -g ghost-cli@latest

# Deno
deno install -g -A -n ghost-cli npm:ghost-cli@latest

To check the ghost cli install succfully in your machine using the following command.

ghost -v

The command output looks like this:

ghost -v

Love open source? We’re hiring JavaScript Engineers to work on Ghost full-time.
https://careers.ghost.org

Running in development mode

Ghost-CLI version: 1.29.1

prerequisite

1. Make sure your ghost cms instance current runing for backup other wise you will face an error.

2. Based on your Ghost CMS version, you need to install the correct supported Node.js version. To learn more about supported Node versions for Ghost CMS, check out the documentation.

To take a backup with the Ghost CLI, run the following command on your machine.

ghost backup

The command output looks like this.

ghost backup

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https://careers.ghost.org

Running in development mode

✔ Enter your Ghost Staff access token 69be0***********5fe32c
✔ Backing up site
Backup saved to /home/officialrajdeepsingh/ghost-cms/projects/backup-from-v6.32.0-on-2026-05-08-14-16-55.zip

After the ghost backup command is successfully executed, it creates a backup folder and saves it as a zip file, including everything such as data, files, images, media, settings, and themes.

How do I obtain the Ghost Staff access token?

Ghost cli asks you for your Ghost Staff access token to get the staff token you need for the Ghost Dashboard > Settings > Staff and click on the staff profile.

Scroll down to the bottom of the profile, go to the Staff access token section, and copy the code and paste it into your terminal.

The main drawback of the Ghost cli is that:

1. To back up with the Ghost CLI, you need basic knowledge of the Linux command line.

2. You have a basic understanding of cloud computing providers based on your usage. If you use Ghost Pro, it covers your backups automatically, and if you use AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, etc., you use the Ghost CLI or other services.

How to check whether a Ghost CMS instance is running or not?

To check whether the Ghost CMS instance is running, use the ghost ls command and examine the status section in the command output.

• If the instance status is "stopped," the Ghost CMS instance is not running.

• If the instance status is "running," the instance is active, and you can access the Ghost CMS using the specified port number.

ghost ls

The command output looks like this.

ghost ls

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https://careers.ghost.org

Running in development mode

┌───────────────┬─────────────────────────────┬─────────┬───────────────────────┬────────────────────────┬──────┬─────────────────┐
│ Name          │ Location                    │ Version │ Status                │ URL                    │ Port │ Process Manager │
├───────────────┼─────────────────────────────┼─────────┼───────────────────────┼────────────────────────┼──────┼─────────────────┤
│ ghost-local   │ ~/startup/themes/test-ghost │ 5.130.6 │ stopped               │ n/a                    │ n/a  │ n/a             │
├───────────────┼─────────────────────────────┼─────────┼───────────────────────┼────────────────────────┼──────┼─────────────────┤
│ ghost-local-1 │ ~/ghost-cms/projects        │ 6.32.0  │ running (development) │ http://localhost:2368/ │ 2368 │ local           │
├───────────────┼─────────────────────────────┼─────────┼───────────────────────┼────────────────────────┼──────┼─────────────────┤
│ ghost-local-2 │ ~/ghost-cms/project         │ 6.22.1  │ stopped               │ n/a                    │ n/a  │ n/a             │
└───────────────┴─────────────────────────────┴─────────┴───────────────────────┴────────────────────────┴──────┴─────────────────┘

What is different between the Ghost CMS dashboard UI and the Ghost CLI?

Both methods I mentioned, the Ghost CMS dashboard and Ghost CLI, are used to create a backup on Ghost CMS.

But the Ghost CLI is the best option for you, and it is easy to use, even if you have some programming knowledge. You need to go to ghost cms project where your Ghost app is created and run the Ghost CLI command to create a backup, and it automatically creates a data backup for you.

But when you use the Ghost CMS dashboard, it is a very easy and time-consuming task; you need to manually download every file, such as Content & settings, Post analytics, Redirects, Routes, Members, and themes file/folder one by one.

Conclusion

Backup is a very important task for every website. In Ghost CMS, you can easily take a backup compared to other cms avaible on the market, especially when you deploy ghost cms on self-deployment using Ghost CLI and ghost cms dashboard.

Backup is crucial in the following situations:

1. When transitioning from one cloud provider to another, such as AWS, Azure, or Google Cloud.

2. When migrating Ghost CMS to another CMS or platform, such as Medium, Hashnode, or WordPress.

For the future, if you want to learn more, follow the Ghost CMS Mastery publication. If you're looking for a freelance developer to build a custom theme, you can check out [Frontend Web](http:// https://frontendweb.agency), a dedicated agency that works with Ghost CMS.