Recipe Archive

A Recipe Archive is a single portable file, norish-recipes-2026-08-16.norishrecipes, holding every recipe you can see, each one complete with its photos and videos.

Currently this feature is limited to just recipes this is NOT a backup.

Exporting your own recipes

Go to Settings => User, find the Export Recipe Archive card, and press Export.

The archive is limited to all recipes you have access to. Not just your own recipes.

Exporting the whole server

A server administrator gets the same button in Settings => Admin, under General, where it covers every recipe on the instance regardless of who owns it. It takes a full content snapshot: useful before a risky change, or when winding an instance down and handing the recipes on.

It is the same operation and the same file format as the personal export, only with a wider scope. There is no privileged extra data behind the admin button.

Importing an archive

Drop the .norishrecipes file on the Import Recipe Archive card, the same place you would drop a Mela or Mealie export. Progress, duplicate handling and per-recipe error reporting all work the way they already do for every other format.

Two things are worth knowing about how an import lands:

• The recipes become yours. Whoever imports an archive owns everything it creates. The original author's display name travels as attribution so you can still tell whose recipe it was, but ownership does not transfer.
• Currently a matching recipe is overwritten, not duplicated. A recipe is matched by its URL or its name within your household, so re-importing your own archive into the same instance updates your library rather than doubling it.

note

Matching on URL or name is easy to abuse: an archive from someone else can overwrite a recipe in your library simply by carrying the same name. Only import archives you trust, and check what an unfamiliar one contains before you feed it in. A future version will make this safer.

What is deliberately not in the file

An archive is an exchange of recipe content. It is not a backup, and it is not an instance migration:

• No account data of anyone. No emails, no avatars, no preferences, no households, no sign-in details. Attribution is a display name and nothing else, which is what makes an archive safe to post publicly or hand to a friend.
• Only your own marks. Your rating and your favourite travel; nobody else's ratings or favourites are in the file.
• No instance state. Share links, planned meals, groceries, stores, allergies and settings stay where they are.