Administration

Administrators manage the Marginalia installation: user accounts, database backups, cleanup of deleted data and extensions. The first account, created on the first start, is an administrator; it can make other users administrators too.

Administrators are also normal users with their own books - they don't see other users' books, lorebooks or settings.

The Admin page

Administrators have an Admin button at the bottom of the workspace. It opens the admin page with four tabs:

Tab
Users	Creating, editing and deleting accounts. See Users.
Database Backups	Backups of the whole database, on demand or on a schedule, and restoring them. See Database backups.
Cleanup	Permanently removing deleted data. See Cleanup.
Extensions	Installing and removing extensions. See Managing extensions.

The data folder

Everything Marginalia stores is in the .marginalia folder in the home directory of the user that runs it (./data on the host with the Docker setup):

Path
marginalia.sqlite (with -wal, -shm)	The database: users, books, lorebooks, settings, everything.
secret.key	Key that encrypts the API keys in the database. Created on the first start; without it, saved API keys can't be read.
db-backups/	Database backups.
data/<login>/backups/manuscripts/<book id>/	Book backups of each user.
extensions/	Installed extension JARs.
desktop/logs/	Logs of the desktop app.

To back up a whole installation, stop Marginalia and copy this folder (including secret.key). While it runs, use database backups for the database; book backups and extensions are plain files and can be copied at any time.