npm run backup covers two payloads; the rest of a Hubs restore lives in your notes

The two payloads are two halves of one object. The database dump is the record of every room: its title, its permissions, its owner account, its scene assignment and the metadata rows that point at uploaded files, and if you lose it the GLB files are still sitting on disk without belonging to any room ^[7]. That interlock is a good reason for the scripts to exist. It is also the entire scope of what they hand you, a single timestamped archive in the `data_backup_1234567890123` pattern holding those two payloads and nothing else ^[6].

Count the inventory instead of reading the feature list. Of the seven categories of state the write-up names around a working instance, the archive owns two and the operator owns five ^[1]. That ratio is the article's real finding, and the author states the consequence directly: `npm run restore-backup` is the last step of a disaster recovery plan rather than the plan, and every step ahead of it is a rebuild you have to perform from your own notes ^[4].

Watch where the advice lands for the simplest deployment. A lecturer running one instance on one VPS is told to keep the built-in backup and add a nightly filesystem snapshot of the node, because the recovery target is the whole box rather than a selective extraction ^[14]. The snapshot is what carries the five categories the archive leaves behind. For the easiest case, in other words, the recommended primary artifact is an image of the machine, and the scripts ride on top of it.

The migration case shows what the rebuild actually contains. Move to a new provider or a new client domain and room URLs, the Reticulum host configuration and certificate issuance all have to be corrected before anyone can join a room, which is why the write-up says to rehearse the whole thing on a scratch host first ^[12]. None of that is a data-load problem, and none of it is timed by the tooling.

The tradeoff is put plainly in the source: the scripts are simple and they cover the data that matters, on the assumption that you can reconstruct the surrounding installation by hand, so effort saved at backup time is effort repaid, under pressure, at restore time ^[15]. The half of the procedure with a command attached is the half already documented. The half that decides how long your rooms are dark is the one sitting in somebody's notes, unversioned and untimed.