Node-Red: Backup & Restore

This article  is a sequel of our Node-Red series of tutorials and focuses on Backup & Restore of Node-Red data. We can backup a node, a flow (number of nodes connected to each others make a flow) or complete Node-Red data using various methods.

Import & Export Menu:

• Select a node or flow, go to Node-Red menu and click on Export.
• You can export:
  • selected nodes.
  • current flow i.e. all the nodes located under a given flow tab.
  • all flows i.e. all the nodes of a Node-Red instance.
• Choose selected nodes on Export tab.
• Click on JSON and Copy to clipboard.
• Now you can:
  • Save the data by pasting it in to a text file.
  •  Import it to another Node-Red instance.
• For importing, go to
• Node-Red menu and click on Import.
• Paste the JSON data in Clipboard section and hit Import.
• Nodes / Flows are now float over the Node-Red window, click to place them and Hit Deploy.

Old School Full Data Backup & Restore:

• Copy all files located in the  Pi Home\pi\.node-red directory and save it.
• Run the Node-Red for the first time in new machine, so that all configurational files are created.
• Paste the files copied before, in the same directory on a new machine.
• Remember to change the xxx of flows_xxx.json and flows_xxx_cred.json files according to the hostname of new machine.
• Restart the Node-Red by command sudo systemctl restart nodered.service.