Export everything and leave

Taking your repositories and history with you, and what an export contains.

Written By Dustin

Last updated About 5 hours ago

TOVIO is designed so that leaving is a clone, not a migration project. Your data is not held hostage by the hosted service, and there is no egress charge for taking it.

The short version

Clone each repository in full. A complete clone contains the entire object store, history, lanes, tags, and the change graph. It is not a partial view of a hosted original — it is the repository.

Make sure you clone completely. Sparse, blobless, shallow, or attachment-excluding clones are the ones you use day to day; an exit copy should be none of those. Fill in an existing partial clone before relying on it.

Clone over the normal sync path. Do not try to scrape the public browse surface: it serves bounded, derived views and is explicitly not an object endpoint, so what you would get is a rendering rather than a repository.

What comes with it

  • Every object, re-verified against its hash on receipt.

  • Full history within your plan's hosted retention window.

  • Your protected content — still encrypted, and still decryptable by whoever holds the keys.

What does not

  • Hosted-only records: proposals, reviews, comments, requested-reviewer state, and hosted audit entries live on the Forge rather than in the object store. Export the audit chain separately if you need it, and remember the review prose is service data, not repository content.

  • History older than your retention window, if the hosted service has already aged it out. Free keeps 90 days; Enterprise keeps two years. That window is a recovery window for discarded work, and it is a different thing from Enterprise's five-year audit retention.

Keys are the thing to check

An export is worthless without the keys to decrypt its protected paths. Verify you hold a working key backup before you cancel, not after. This is the failure that cannot be undone by support.

Do it before the boundary

Cancellation takes effect at a renewal boundary, and retention runs on your plan's schedule. Export while the plan is still current rather than in the days after it lapses.

Running it yourself afterwards

A clone can be served from your own machine with tovio serve, or from your own Forge. The engine and CLI are Apache-2.0, so continuing without the hosted service is a supported path rather than a fallback.