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hscli

Backups & restore

hscli backup dumps your entire Help Scout account to JSON — conversations, customers, and attachments — with incremental refresh, resume, and deletion detection. See the command reference for all flags.

Full backup

Section titled “Full backup”
zsh — hscli
$ hscli backup --out ./hs-data --attachments
✓ 4,210 convs · 1,980 customers · 38 MB · exit 0

The output directory is a plain tree of JSON files — diff it, grep it, or commit it.

Incremental refresh

Section titled “Incremental refresh”

Runs after the first are incremental by default: only what changed since the last sync is fetched. Add --reconcile to also detect deletions, or --full to force a complete re-pull.

Terminal window
hscli backup --out ./hs-data --attachments --reconcile   # incremental + deletions
hscli backup --out ./hs-data --full                       # force a full re-pull

Resume an interrupted run

Section titled “Resume an interrupted run”
Terminal window
hscli backup --out ./hs-data --resume

Other useful flags: --compress (gzip output), --include / --exclude (limit resources), --parallel (tune concurrency), and --dry-run (preview without writing).